Book at Bedtime - Monday 11 - Friday 15 August

It's summer 1936 in rural Sussex, a local girl Kitty Allen answers an advert looking for 'a good ...

Book of the Week - Monday 11 - Friday 15 August

From the streets, bars and dance halls of Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia to those of Panama, Puerto...

Open Book - Owen Sheers, presenter of this week's Open Book, on location in New York.

At forty, without professions to define them, and with children growing up, Amy, Jill, Roberta an...

Owen Sheers talks to Meg Wolitzer, author of The Position, about her new novel. The Ten Year Nap is set in Manhattan and looks at the dilemma faced by four mothers who, ten years after the birth of their children, are uncertain whether to return to wor...

'The book was called Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment. The title, when the childre...

Book of the Week - Monday 4 - Friday 8 August

Following a chance encounter with a psychic, Angus Bell sets off on an 8,000-mile Skoda-powered r...

Classic Serial - Sunday 3 August 2008

In Istanbul, in the late 1590s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of hi...

August's Bookclub - Booker-shortlisted novel which focuses on a five year period in the life of Henry James, following the failure of a West End play. Tóibín assures readers that anyone unfamiliar with James can follow it ? although if you are an afici...

It is January 1895 and Henry James's play, Guy Domville, from which he hoped to make his fortune,...

A Good Read - July 29th - Sue MacGregor's choice:

This text is an updated edition of Flaubert's classic tale. Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, t...

A Good Read - July 29th - Tracy-Ann Oberman's choice:

Includes the author's views on overpopulation, propaganda, advertising and government control. Th...

A Good Read - July 29th - Shaun Ley's choice:

Jabez was a businessman, philanthropist, politician, temperance campaigner and charmer. He was al...

Open Book - 27 July 2008 - Mariella is joined by Orange Prize nominee and Somerset Maugham Prize winner Deirdre Madden, to talk about her new novel Molly Fox's Birthday. The book centres on a triangular friendship between actress Molly Fox, a nameles...

Dublin, Midsummer: While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house ...

Book of the Week - Monday 28 - Friday 1 August

Green (ish), keen (definitely) Perrier-winning Mark Watson is halving his carbon footprint and, ...

Book at Bedtime - Monday 28 - Friday 8 August

Sam Marsdyke falls for a young, sophisticated girl from London, while she begins to see him as a ...

A Good Read - 25th July - Sue MacGregor's choice:

The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged as well. Ignatius ignores them as h...

A Good Read - 25th July - Julian Barnes' choice:

Set in Russia 1913, Frank Reid arrives home from work on a day just like any other to find that h...

A Good Read - 25th July - Maureen Freely's choice:

In the Polish city of Gdansk, our narrator Pawel tells of the driving lessons he took in the earl...

Woman's Hour Drama - Monday 28 - Friday 8 August

Stephanie Sandford, recently widowed, must tell her family the truth - but the past is indistinct...

Open Book - 27 July 2008 - Mariella is joined by Orange Prize nominee and Somerset Maugham Prize winner Deirdre Madden, to talk about her new novel Molly Fox's Birthday. The book centres on a triangular friendship between actress Molly Fox, a nameles...

Dublin, Midsummer: While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house ...

Open Book - 27 July 2008 - Despite being out of print for twenty years, The Grass Arena by John Healy has been reprinted as a Penguin Classic. The autobiography covers the period of John Healy's life when he was living rough, as an alcoholic, in London...

John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon fi...

Book of the Week - Monday 21 - Friday 25 July

As he grew up, the author witnessed the decline of Britain and the rise of America, the end of Br...