World Book Club

In this edition of World Book Club on BBC World Service, Jostein Gaarder talks to Harriett Gilbert about his novel Sophie’s World at The House of Literature, Oslo. A chart-topping global surprise bestseller Sophie’s World draws us into the world of the great philosophers through the intriguing character of 14-year-old Sophie and her mysterious teacher. As their relationship develops a story emerges which raises profound questions about the biggest questions of all: where we come from, the origin of the universe and the meaning of life. The prolific and prize-winning Norwegian writer explains to a room full of his readers how amazed he was by the phenomenal success of the novel and how attached he got to his characters as he created his multi-layered tale.

This month World Book Club comes to a surprisingly sunny Oslo as part of our mini Norwegian season to talk to one of the country’s most feted novelists Per Petterson, about his phenomenally successful novel Out Stealing Horses.Per will be answering questions from a rapt audience here in the elegant canteen of his publishers about his poignant, compelling multi-award-winning tale. Through passages of often achingly beautiful prose Out Stealing Horses explores universal themes of isolation, loss of innocence, paternal love and sexual passion and the unexpected betrayals that can follow in their wake.Photo: Per Petterson by Tom Martinsen)

Maya Angelou reflects on some of her earliest and most difficult memories and talks about her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in this special commemorative edition of World Book Club from our archive.

This month chart-topping US writer and showman Harlan Coben will be talking to Harriett Gilbert and a studio full of his readers about his page-turner of a thriller, Six Years. Jake Fisher, a lovelorn professor of political science searches out the girl of his dreams who suddenly dumped him for another man six years ago and begged him not to contact her. When he finds himself entangled with a bunch of ruthless killers and criminals from the underworld Jake knows he should back off but passion for his lost love draws him further into a terrifying web of intrigue and murder. Hear what Harlan has to say about how he creates such tightly coiled plots and why the sound of an upstairs toilet flushing is the scariest noise you can hear.

Bestselling British writer Malorie Blackman talks about her page-turning novel for teenagers and young adults Noughts and Crosses. A gripping modern-day tale of star-crossed lovers which aims to challenge our perceptions of race, power and truth, Noughts and Crosses is set in an alternative world where whites are the oppressed underclass and blacks are all-powerful and, often, all corrupt. An excited audience of all ages gathers to discuss the novel with Malorie Blackman.

This month we’re talking to one of Turkey’s foremost writers Elif Shafak. She’s answering your questions about her bestselling novel The Forty Rules of Love, an investigation into love, mysticism and the life of the famed Sufi poet Rumi. Crossing continents and centuries two parallel love stories unfold and lives are turned upside down: Ella, an unhappily married modern day American housewife falls for a mysterious email correspondent and Rumi, the 13th Century mystic encounters his spiritual mentor, the wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz.Photo: Mychele Daniau/AFP/Getty Images.

World Book Club talks to the chronicler of 21st Century urban Australia Christos Tsiolkas. He talks to Harriett Gilbert about his controversial, award-winning novel The Slap which has polarised opinion in his native country and across the globe. In it he presents an apparently minor domestic incident, when a man smacks a badly behaved child, from eight very different perspectives and examines how its aftermath reverberates through the lives and communities of everyone who witnesses it happen.(Photo: Christos Tsiolkas)

This month World Book Club is in a reflective mood as we mark the beginning of the centenary commemorations for World War One by inviting multi-award-winning British writer Pat Barker on to the programme. She'll be talking to us about her internationally renowned novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy which culminated in the Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road. Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and now recognised, twenty-two years after its publication, as a modern war classic, Regeneration is a part-historical, part-fictional exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.Picture: WW1 patients recuperating in hospital in 1918, Credit: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

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.

Harriett Gilbert talks to the bestselling author Neil Gaiman, voted by listeners as the 'most wanted' guest for the programme. Neil is a British writer, comic book author, a short-story writer, a science fiction and fantasy novelist, now living in the United States. And our chosen book American Gods tells the story of the gods brought by immigrants over the centuries, from Scandinavia, Ireland, Russia, Greece, Egypt, and what happens to them as the years pass and they get forgotten, and surpassed by the modern gods of technology – television, mobile phones and the media.Join Harriett Gilbert, and an invited audience to hear Neil Gaiman talk about his book American Gods.

At this crucial moment in Egypt’s story, this month’s World Book Club talks to one of the country’s great writers, Ahdaf Soueif, about her internationally acclaimed novel The Map of Love.In her Booker-shortlisted bestseller Soueif weaves together two poignant stories separated by a century of Egyptian history: a love story between aristocratic English Anna Winterbourne and romantic firebrand Sharif al-Baroudi, is set amidst the brutality of British imperialism and the fierce political battles of the Egyptian Nationalists. This tale reaches across time to an account of their descendants negotiating passions and political unrest in late 20th Century Egypt. We hear how Soueif had originally set out to write a ‘tawdry romance’ but hadn’t managed to stop herself writing something much more meaningful and monumental!Listen to this great Egyptian voice clearly and compellingly explain exactly what has gone wrong in Egypt, in her eyes, over the last decade.

World Book Club’s Harriett Gilbert talks to the acclaimed Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri, in front of a multi-national audience and listeners around the world at the Nehru Centre in London. Chaudhuri will discuss his novel The Immortals, which is about the place of Indian classical music in the modern world.Set in the heart of the world of the Bombay middle class, it tells the story of three very different classical-musicians whose lives thread in and out of each other in 1970s and 80s Bombay. The city itself is on a roll -- expanding, growing ever richer and more glittery -- and the novel's main characters are variously jostled by the changes taking place around them. But they're also struggling with such matters as the place of musical tradition in the modern world, and the need to earn a living while pursuing an artistic vocation. Amit Chaudhuri himself is a musician as well as author and he talks about how contemporary Indian classical music is currently in a moribund state, as it takes a great deal of commitment to be successful. And in a novel filled with strong and lively characters, Amit explains how difficult he finds it to write characters, and how in his work as a teacher of creative writing, he finds characterisation impossible to teach.Hear him also read three extracts from The Immortals and take calls from listeners in Delhi and Pennsylvania who will bring their own international perspective to the story.

With the current global release of the film of Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s much garlanded novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, another chance to hear the writer talking about his tense and provocative thriller. Through the eyes of the young, worldly-wise Pakistani, Changez, in conversation with a mysterious American stranger in a café in Lahore, this brief, gripping novel tells of a love affair with America that goes dangerously wrong and tackles the ever more relevant and complex issues of Islamic fundamentalism and America’s ‘war on terror’ with sympathy and balance. So, go see the film, or better still read the book – and then tune in to World Book Club with Mohsin Hamid and Harriett Gilbert, to see what readers around the world made of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.(Image: Mohsin Hamid, author)

This month a very special edition of World Book Club coming from New York City in the USA. We’re partnering up with the acclaimed Leonard Lopate Show’s Book Club on the New York radio station WNYC. In advance of the much anticipated film about to open worldwide we’ve come here to discuss that classic novel of The Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby. And who better to talk to about it than chronicler of today’s New York young urban sophisticates, novelist Jay McInerney. He is joined on stage by F Scott Fitzgerald scholar Anne Margaret Daniel and together we discuss the haunting tale of dazzling, doomed Jay Gatsby as told to through the eyes of young Midwesterner Nick Carraway. Jay McInerney photo by David Howell.

This month World Book Club are guests of the American Embassy in London and Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience will be talking to US superstar thriller writer John Grisham. They will be discussing his gripping debut novel A Time To Kill, written almost 30 years ago while Grisham was still a jobbing attorney in Mississippi. In the novel a black father takes the law into his own hands after worrying that the legal system will fail to adequately punish the two white men who brutally raped and beat his daughter. In a fascinating discussion about racism in the deep south of America hear how John Grisham has wrestled with his own feelings of prejudice, his changing views on the death penalty and how he's stumped for words when told he's beautiful!(Image: John Grisham. Credit: Bob Krasner)

This month on World Book Club Harriett Gilbert will be talking with one of Sri Lanka’s leading writers, Romesh Gunesekera, about his acclaimed novel Reef. Reef is the moving, multi award-winning story of young Triton, a talented young chef who goes to work for Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamps, sea movements and the island's disappearing reef. So committed is Triton to pleasing his master’s palate that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradise, and yet subtle undercurrents of impending doom do ripple through Triton’s haunting story of memory and friendship.

To mark the release of the acclaimed film of David Mitchell’s masterpiece Cloud Atlas around the world, there’s another chance to catch the multiple prize-winning English author talking about his dazzling novel. With dramatic use of time-shifts and literary forms, Cloud Atlas circles the globe, reaching from the South Seas of the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future. Offering an enthralling and often chilling vision of humanity’s will to power and where it will lead us, David Mitchell's deftly crafted novel follows the stories of six people whose lives interlock in subtle and mysterious ways. So go see the film or even better read the book and listen for another chance to join Harriett Gilbert and writer David Mitchell to hear what readers both in the studio and around the world made of Cloud Atlas.

This month in a very special edition, we’re celebrating that most English of novelists Jane Austen. It’s two hundred years this month since the publication of Pride and Prejudice and we’ve invited bestselling British novelist and Jane Austen aficionado PD James, along with Anglo-Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin, also a great Austen fan and from Australia Susannah Fullerton, President of the Australian Jane Austen Society, all here to share with us their passion for this much loved classic English novel. We’ll also be hearing from other writers from around the world – AS Byatt, Colm Toibin, Nii Parkes, Kamila Shamsie, to name a few, why the razor-sharp wit of Elizabeth Bennet and the cool hauteur of the gorgeous Mr Darcy are still drawing in more readers than ever across the globe in the twenty-first century.Susannah Fullerton is the author of Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.Image: Jane Austen, Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert talks to one of New Zealand's greatest living writers, CK Stead, about his prize-winning novel My Name Was Judas. With this playful re-writing of the life and death of Jesus, CK Stead poses some profound and thought-provoking questions on the nature of belief and divinity itself. Judas's name has become synonymous with 'betrayer', but in this witty, and controversial retelling, some 40 years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally puts forward his story as he remembers it. Looking back on his childhood and youth from an old age the gospel writers denied him, Judas recalls his friendship with Jesus; their schooling together; the 12 disciples and their stories; their journeys together and their dealings with the powers of Rome and the Jewish clerics.(Image: CK Stead)

On this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling American writer Paul Auster about his acclaimed work The New York Trilogy. In three brilliant variations on the classic detective story, Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York City his own. Each interconnected tale exploits the elements of standard detective fiction to achieve an entirely new genre that was ground-breaking when it was published three decades ago. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of identity and what it means to be human. Hear what readers made of Paul and his novel and what happened when another Paul Auster stood up to introduce himself to the Paul Auster on the stage.

This month's World Book Club is brought to you from the Institute of Cervantes in London where Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling Spanish writer Javier Marias about his prize-winning work A Heart So White. This acclaimed novel explores profoundly disturbing questions about the nature of knowledge, curiosity and truth itself. When the narrator Juan marries his sweetheart Luisa he is haunted by family secrets that cast their long shadow over his contentment and ponders the nature of secrecy – its convenience, its price – does he even want to know the truth he asks himself. In the company of a lively group of readers at the Spanish Cultural Centre Marias also playfully dispenses his wisdom on how to keep a marriage together and why pen and paper beats technology.

In September's edition of World Book Club superstar US novelist Jodi Picoult talks about her heart-rending novel My Sister's Keeper. A searing examination of what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person - My Sister's Keeper confronts the question of whether it is morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child’s life. In the programme Jodi talks with disarming openness about the near tragedy in her own life that helped to drive her to write the novel and she explains why for her writing feels like a form of schizophrenia.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's searing yet ultimately uplifting coming-out, coming-of-age tale, in which a young girl learns to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing, and set out on her own path in life. To mark thirty years since its publication, here's another chance to hear the memorable World Book Club in which Jeanette Winterson discusses where fact meets fiction - there are distinct parallels to her own life. Hear how important this ground-breaking novel has been for readers around the globe. British writer Jeanette Winterson is in conversation with Harriett Gilbert (First broadcast in 2012.)(Photo: Jeanette Winterson) (Credit: Ysabel Halpin)

This is the last edition of the London Calling season of World Book Clubs - which have been going out each Saturday during May.This week the programme are guests of The Nehru Centre - the cultural wing of the High Commission of India in London - and we're talking to acclaimed Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh about his haunting novel, The Shadow Lines. A moving and thought-provoking meditation on the very real yet invisible lines, which divide nations, people, and families, The Shadow Lines focuses on a family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London. From the tales of his colourful cousin the narrator conjures up a picture of London in his imagination that is so vivid that he recognizes it instantly when he visits years later and learns that real places can be invented inside your head.(Photo: Amitav Ghosh) Credit: Getty Images)

This week we've the third edition in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which are going out each Saturday during May. This week we're talking to Howard Jacobson at the first Soho Literary Festival in the heart of the UK capital about his dazzling Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question. A moving but often laugh-out-loud fictional foray into what it means to be Jewish Jacobson's award-winning novel features three old school friends who despite their very different lives have never quite lost touch. Over dinner one balmy London evening they revisit a time before they had all loved and lost, unaware that an event later that night will change their lives for ever.

Andrea Levy discusses her novel Small Island with a studio audience, and the author revisits the West London setting of her multi-prize-winning novel. A thought-provoking tale of love, friendship and immigration set in Earl's Court in 1948, Small Island focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own 'small island', move to England. Once in the mother country, however, for which the men had fought and died for during World War II, their reception is not quite the warm embrace that they had hoped for.Join Harriett Gilbert, readers in the studio and around the globe and Andrea Levy both in and out of the studio for World Book Club.(Image: Author Andrea Levy)

Coming up the first in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which will be going out each Saturday over the next four weeks.In the run up to the London Olympic games we'll be discussing four novels which focus on different aspects of the United Kingdom’s colourful and historic capital city. This week we talk to acclaimed novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd who will be discussing his haunting Whitbread prize-winning novel, Hawksmoor, with an audience at St George's Church, Bloomsbury.St George's is the final church designed by lauded architect of the English Baroque, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a central and sinister figure in this compelling murder mystery set amongst the labyrinthine streets of 18th Century London.(Image: Peter Ackroyd)

World Book Club celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of that modern classic novel Beloved with another chance to hear the programme with American writer Toni Morrison.In 2009 Toni Morrison came to the South Bank Arts Centre beside the River Thames in London to talk to a packed audience about her Pulitzer Prize-winning, international bestseller Beloved.Having lost none of its power to shock a quarter of a century on, Beloved stares unflinchingly into the abyss of racism and transforms history into a poetic chronicle of slavery and its terrible, unending aftermath.(Image: Toni Morrison. Credit: Peter Devlin)

Harriett Gilbert talks this month to American writer Jonathan Safran Foer about his novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.Set in the aftermath of 9/11, it is the story of a young boy coming to terms with the tragedy of his father's death in the World Trade Centre. After finding a mysterious key left behind in his Dad's closet, Oskar sets out across New York hoping to find some answers. Both a meditation on pain, loss and the healing power of love - as well as an examination of the psyche of post 9/11 New York - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel that lingers in the mind.(Image: Jonathan S Foer. Credit: Giuseppe Aliprandi)

February 2012 marks the bicentenary of Victorian author Charles Dickens. In this special edition of World Book Club, biographer Claire Tomalin talks to Harriett Gilbert about Dickens novel Great Expectations live from the BBC Radio Theatre, with actor Simon Callow.(Image: Charles Dickens. Credit: Getty Images)For further details of the British Council’s Global Celebration of Charles Dickens visit: www.britishcouncil.org/dickens2012

Acclaimed Maori writer Witi Ihimaera talks to Harriett Gilbert and a group of readers at the Cheltenham Literary Festival about his magical, lore-laden novel, The Whale Rider. It tells the haunting story of a spirited Maori girl, her tribe and their mysteriously intertwined destinies. Kahu, a 12-year-old girl struggles to become the chief of her tribe but her grandfather Koro, whose attention she craves, believes that this is a role reserved for males only. Kahu will not be ignored and in her quest she finds a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once this sacred gift is revealed, will Kahu be able to assume her rightful position and lead her tribe to a bold new future?(Image: Witi Ihimaera 2015) (Credit: XAVIER LEOTY/AFP/Getty Images)

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed British writer Penelope Lively about her Booker Prize winning novel Moon Tiger. A haunting tale of loss, loneliness and secret desires Moon Tiger is the kaleidoscopic story of maverick historian Claudia Hampton.Telling nurses on her death bed that she will write a "history of the world and in the process my own," she charts her intensely-lived life from her childhood in England after World War I to the war-torn desert plains of Egypt, 30 years later – and beyond. Egocentric and condescending as well as vulnerable and gutsy, Claudia is a complex heroine for our times who lingers in the mind long after you put the book down.(Image: Penelope Lively. Copyright: Penguin)

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Israeli writer David Grossman about his award-winning novel, To the End of the Land. Winner of - amongst others - the Wingate Jewish Book Prize for 2012, To the End of the Land is a novel of extraordinary power and lyrical intensity about the power of love and the devastating cost of war. Instead of celebrating her son Ofer’s discharge from the Israeli Army, Ora is appalled when he reenlists and is sent back to the front for a major offensive. Unable to bear the thought of sitting alone waiting for the ‘notifiers’ to bring her bad news, she sets off on a hike across Israel with Ofer’s biological father who has never met his son and has has lived in near-seclusion since being tortured as a prisoner in the Yom Kippur war three decades before.Photo credit: Reuters

With the international release of the much anticipated film of We Need To Talk about Kevin in October, here's another chance to catch the World Book Club in which Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience talk to acclaimed American writer Lionel Shriver about this searing novel. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, 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 of his mother Eva to his absent father Franklin, the novel raises questions about culpability, the limits of maternal love and the nature of evil itself.

Harriett Gilbert talks to Hisham Matar about his stunning debut novel In The Country Of Men. Set in the bewildering world of Tripoli, it is the emotional tale of a young boy growing up, where fears, secrets and betrayal threaten the ties of family and friendship. The novel was shortlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize.

Hariett Gilbert talks to Irish author Colm Toibin about his book Brooklyn.A haunting tale of love, loss and familial duty, and winner of the 2009 UK Costa Novel Award, Brooklyn follows the fortunes of a young Irish woman who leaves home to make a new life for herself in 1950s New York. Hear how Colm's own painful memories of homesickness in America and Spain inform Eilis' experiences in Brooklyn and how her ambivalent relationship to the small town Ireland she's left behind also echoes Colm Toibin's own.

This month's World Book Club comes from the church of St Mary Magdalene in Woodstock, England. Harriett Gilbert talks to Swedish superstar Henning Mankell about Faceless Killers, the first novel in his globally acclaimed series featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander.In it, an elderly farm couple is brutally murdered and the only clue is the wife's uttering of the word "foreign" before she dies. Wallander must find the killers before anger towards foreigners boils over. Hear about - and from - Wallander's female admirers around the globe all apparently queuing up to marry him, and about how Mankell plants deliberate errors - one in each novel - that no-one has ever spotted.

Acclaimed British writer Val McDermid discusses her page-turning crime novel A Place of Execution. A taut psychological suspense thriller told through two overlapping and interlocking narratives, A Place of Execution takes place both in the present day as well as 1963 rural England with two different investigators exploring the disappearance of a 13 year old girl who vanished without a trace on a bitterly cold winter's afternoon. This is not a cosy novel but one that confronts us with brutal realities and stirs up uncomfortable reactions, gripping the reader up to the very last page and its stunning conclusion.

Detective Erast Fandorin investigates a student's apparent suicide in 19th-century Moscow. Russian writer Boris Akunin talks to Harriett Gilbert and listeners in the studio and around the world about his page-turning, best-selling crime novel The Winter Queen. After setting out to solve the apparent suicide of a university student in 19th Century Moscow, eager young investigator Erast Fandorin soon finds himself embroiled in a far-reaching international conspiracy. Boris Akunin tells us where he found the inspiration for his winning young detective who bounces from one cliff-hanger to the next. He also describes why short Russian literature - rather than the heavy tomes of earlier generarions - provides a better "role model" for today's youngsters.Photo: Boris Akunin Credit: Getty Images

Dysfunctional Norwegian detective Harry Hole navigates a World War Two ghost story. Voted the best Norwegian crime novel ever, Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast delves into neo-Nazi activity in Norway and ends up re-examining a crime that had its roots in the battlefields of the Eastern Front in World War II. Hear how Jo admits that there’s more than a little of him in his dysfunctional detective Harry Hole and how his own parents ended up on opposing sides during the war, father fighting for the Nazis and his mother in the Norwegian resistance.Jo Nesbo photo: Hakon-Eikesdal

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Spanish writer and historian Javier Cercas about his haunting novel Soldiers of Salamis. Internationally feted and winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2004, Soldiers of Salamis delves into the painful history of Spain's Civil War through the gripping, death-defying story of fascist soldier Sanchez Mazas. In his meditation on the nature of heroism and humanity in war, of remembrance and forgetting after war, the narrator moves from cynical indifference through fascination to wholehearted empathy as the true hero of the story eventually emerges centre stage.

In Eat the Rich the inimitable American satirist P.J. O'Rourke tours the world trying to understand why some countries 'have' and some countries 'have not'. He talks to Harriett Gilbert and answers questions about his book from a live studio audience and listeners around the world.

Harriett Gilbert talks to the acclaimed German writer Bernhard Schlink about his explosively controversial novel, The Reader, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.Made into an Oscar-winning Hollywood film with Kate Winslet The Reader tells of law student Michael Berg who, nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, re-encounters his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial.

Damon Galgut's internationally acclaimed novel is the story of an idealistic medical graduate who arrives at an isolated South African hospital to take up a year's community service.Damon discusses his novel The Good Doctor, and answers questions from BBC World Service listeners around the world.

Harriett Gilbert and an audience at the Drill Hall Theatre in Central London talk to bestselling Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie about her internationally acclaimed novel Burnt Shadows. Spanning much of the 20th Century and into the 21st, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties honoured and betrayed, and loves lost and found. In the devastating aftermath of the second atomic bomb, Hiroko Tanaka leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the uncertain wake of 9/11, to the novel's nail-biting climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow over the entire world over.(Photo: Kamila Shamsie. Credit: Reuters)

This month's World Book Club comes from the Jesus Centre in London.Harriett Gilbert and readers talk to bestselling writer Barbara Kingsolver about her internationally acclaimed novel The Poisonwood Bible.Having sold four million copies around the world, Kingsolver's most ambitious novel paints an intimate portrait of a crisis-ridden family amid the larger backdrop of an African nation in chaos.In 1959 an overzealous Baptist minister Nathan Price drags his wife and four daughters deep into the heart of the Congo on a mission to save the unenlightened souls of Africa.As his plans unravel in tandem with the country's dreams of becoming an independent democracy, the five women narrate the novel, each in their own inimitable voice.

Part stunning literary thriller, part gothic novel, the book The Shadow of the Wind is a page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead. It is a potent mix of a coming-of-age novel and a tragic love story set in Barcelona's post-war years. Harriet Gilbert puts questions from the audience to the author Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

Harriett Gilbert talks to David Mitchell about his novel Cloud Atlas.