World Book Club Folgen

Prize-winning author Brian Aldiss, the grand old man of British science fiction writing, talks about his 1964 classic sci-fi novel Greybeard. Set decades after the Earth's population has been sterilised as a result of nuclear bomb tests in space, the world is gradually emptying of humans. The remaining ageing, childless population are left to face the fact that there is no younger generation coming to replace them. Instead, nature is reclaiming the earth and Greybeard and his clan wander this strange new and dangerous land searching out a place of safety to grow ever older in.(Photo: Brian Aldiss, courtesy of Brian)

One hundred years after his birth this month’s World Book Club, will be discussing Albert Camus' seminal novel The Outsider with his acclaimed biographer Oliver Todd, and Professor of French at Sheffield University, David Walker. And appropriately the programme comes from the heart of the Left Bank of Paris to hear from them – at the world famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company overlooking Notre Dame. Here an eager audience gathers in the upstairs attic room where aspiring novelists are regularly to be found sleeping off their exertions in quiet alcoves. As well as questions from the audience in the bookshop and from our wider audience abroad World Book Club also hears from feted writers from around the world explaining why they think this most startling tale of sun, sea, sand and murder is still one of the great classic novels of our age.To complement this edition of World Book Club you can listen to a BBC drama of The Outsider and also to The Insider, a new play imagining the story of the silent Algerian characters that appear in Camus’ novel.Picture: Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images.

This month a chance to hear Pulitzer Prize winning Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, whose new novel The Lowland has just been shortlisted for the British Man Booker Prize. With presenter Harriett Gilbert and a studio full of readers Lahiri talks about her acclaimed short story collection Unaccustomed Earth, whose eight tales consider the lives of Indian American characters and how they deal with their mixed cultural environment. Beginning in America, and spilling back over memories and generations to India, the book explores how family life and relationships are affected by the uprootings and resettlings of the Bengali immigrant experience.Picture: Jhumpa Lahiri. Credit: Marco Delogu.