Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Egyptian writer Alaa Al-Aswany about his bestselling novel The Yacoubian Building. It was the Arab world’s number-one bestseller for five years running after it was published in 2002. The Yacoubian Building interweaves the stories of a group of diverse characters who live and work in downtown Cairo. A moving study of politics and power, sex and revenge - centred on the apartment building - the Yacoubian building, which still stands in Cairo today.The novel offers a compelling yet daringly scathing portrayal of modern Egypt since the Revolution of 1952.
Kultur & Gesellschaft
World Book Club Folgen
The world's great authors discuss their best-known novel.
Folgen von World Book Club
288 Folgen
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Folge vom 07.11.2009World Book Club: Alaa Al Aswany
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Folge vom 03.10.2009World Book Club: Gunter GrassHalf a century on from its first publication, G�nter Grass will be talking about The Tin Drum from his home in Lubeck, Germany.
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Folge vom 09.07.2009World Book Club: Lionel ShriverThis month Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed American writer Lionel Shriver.Her prizewinning novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin, is the profoundly disturbing story of a boy who, shortly before his 16th birthday, kills seven classmates in a high school massacre. Grippingly but unreliably narrated through the letters from his mother to his absent father, the novel raises questions about culpability, the limits of maternal love and the nature of evil itself.
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Folge vom 04.06.2009Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow SunIn this month's World Book Club Harriett Gilbert will be at London’s South Bank Arts Centre talking to internationally acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about her bestselling novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Winner of the UK Orange Prize for fiction in 2007 Half of a Yellow Sun charts the stories of three intersecting lives turned upside down by the Biafran war in the late 1960s. Village boy Ugwu comes to work for a charismatic professor. The professor’s glamorous girlfriend Olanna forgoes her life of luxury to live with him and Englishman Richard is in thrall to Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister. Meanwhile the shadow of this most horrific of civil wars, whose repercussions are still felt in Nigeria today, looms ever larger.(Photo: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) (Credit: Jeff Overs/BBC)