Series 3: Episode 1

This week on The Book Show, Mariella is joined by Will Self who talks about his new book Liver – A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes. The young and hugely talented Chmamanda Ngozi Adichie is next on the sofa, talking about her books, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. Finally, the Baroness of Books, P.D. James talks about the return of her favourite fictional character Adam Dalgleish in The Private Patient.

If you liked Will Self’s Liver, why not try these other books of deadpan humour:
Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it…

JG Ballard: The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 1
An exhilarating overview of Ballard's development as a short-story writer, from the singing orchids of Vermilion Sands in Prima Belladonna, completed in 1956, to the millennial anxieties of Report from an Obscure Planet, written in 1992.

If you fell in love with Chmamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Africa, give these a go:
V.S. Naipaul: A Bend in the River
A story of Salim who leaves his family home to start a business in Central Africa at a town on the bend of the great Congo River. The Europeans have withdrawn and the town is a scene of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, poverty and a lack of preparation for the modern world they have entered.

Doris Lessing: The Grass Is Singing
Set in Rhodesia, this is the story of Dick, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, dependent and disappointed. Both are trapped by poverty, and in the heat of the brick and tin house, hemmed in by the bush, Mary finds herself seeking solace in the arms of the houseboy.

If you love the tension in P.D. James’ novels, hold onto your seat with these thrillers:
Cyril Hare: Untimely Death
Francis Pettigrew travels to Exmoor for a holiday with his wife - an area in which as a young boy he was traumatised by coming across a dead body on the moor. In an attempt to exorcise this trauma, Pettigrew walks across the moor to the place where the incident occurred - only to find another dead body. Moreover when he returns to the scene with the police, the body is gone. Did he really see a body…?

Barbara Vine: The Birthday Present

Ruth Rendell’s 13th novel writing as Barbara Vine, The Birthday Present tells the story of a government rising star who also leads a lively personal life. He arranges a birthday present for his lover by having her kidnapped. Things do not go to plan and he finds that everything he holds dear is about to be stripped away from him.

We snooped over to Zoe Heller's bedroom and found her reading these books:

Philip Gourevitch: The Paris Review Interviews, Vol 1
How do great writers do it? From James M Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy" to Joan Didion's account on composing her books - "I constantly retype my own sentences," The Paris Review has elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age.

Tony Judt: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
Judt introduces these essays with a jolting jeremiad about the dismal state of American intellectual life: the ignorance of history, the ready submission to fear, the determination to celebrate martial adventures.

Joseph O’Neill: Netherland
A stream of consciousness, rambling monologue on Dutch businessman Hans van den Broek whose shaky marriage to wife Rachel and friendship with charismatic West Indian Chuck Ramkissoon who tries to introduce cricket to New York make for a hugely entertaining book.


Antonia Fraser picked her favourite line from Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life


In this week's Book Club, Jennifer Shelley from Bow Windows in Lewes recommends her favourite reading:
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.


THE GUESTS’ CHOICES
Will Self has chosen Norman Lewis’ Naples ’44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth as his favourite book. Sent as a British Intelligence officer to "the world's largest village" shortly after the Allied landing at Salerno, Lewis found Naples a place almost beyond civilized imagining. Terrible struggling is everywhere and Lewis notes: "Until now I had clung to the comforting belief that human beings eventually came to terms with pain and sorrow. Now I understood I was wrong."

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wishes she had written Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a story of a great warrior, Okonowo. Equipped with a fiery temper, he is one of the most powerful men of his clan and refuses to show weakness to anyone. When outsiders threaten the traditions of his clan, Okonowo takes violent action but will his pride eventually destroy him?

P.D. James picked Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love as her favourite. Mitford’s story tells of Linda who is longing for love and is obsessed with weddings and sex. Finding Mr Right proves difficult and Linda must bear marriage with Tony, the stuffy Tory MP, and handsome but humourless communist Christian, before finding real passion with Fabrice in wartime Paris.