Series 3: Episode 2

Joining Mariella Frostrup on The Book Show this week are the legendary Elizabeth-Jane Howard who has made a welcome return with her first book in nine years, Love All. The patron saint of poetry, Roger McGough is next on the sofa and he treats us to two poems from his new book, Slapstick. Finally, the queen of emotional drama, Anita Shreve, meets Mariella to talk about her new book, Testimony.


If you liked Elizabeth-Jane Howard’s Love All, why not give these two books about gripping and poignant relationships a try:

Mary Wesley: The Chamomile Lawn
Based partly on her own experiences of wartime England, The Chamomile Lawn is a sexy, wise and sophisticated tale which follows five young, upper-middle class cousins as they divide their time between blacked-out wartime London and a large house in Cornwall. With characteristic lightness of touch, Mary Wesley examines the transience of life and the vividness of youth.

Joanna Trollope: A Village Affair
When Alice Jordan moves to a beautiful 18th century house in Wiltshire village with her husband and three children, she finds that the rural idyll does not bring the happiness she expected. Almost inevitably Alice falls in love with someone else, but controversially that someone turns out to be a woman. How will the local villagers respond?


If you liked Roger McGough, test drive these for further volumes of entrancing verse for the smaller members of your family:

Spike Milligan: Silly Verse for Kids
A collection of absurd, sublime and typically anarchic verse by the brilliant Spike Milligan. Inspired by listening to his own children, and marvelling at the way they used language, Milligan delved into their world to create classic poems such as ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’ which will delight adults and children alike.

Brian Patten: Gargling with Jelly
With first lines like “we love to squeeze bananas, we love to squeeze ripe plums, and when they are feeling sad we love to squeeze our mums…” who could resist this cult children’s classic. The collection of poems features cartoon heroes that come to life, naughty children with nasty habits, giants, goblins, unhappy ghosts and lonely caretakers.


If you liked Anita Shreve’s Testimony and are on the look-out for more gripping emotional drama that deals with modern moral dilemmas, you might want to try these:

Jodi Picoult: Keeping Faith
Seven year old Faith, the young daughter of a recently divorced couple, reacts by confiding in an imaginary friend and then performing miraculous healings. Meanwhile, her depressed mother sees an opportunity to exploit her daughter via a media frenzy. Is she getting back at her ex-husband or genuinely facing an impossible crisis?

Sue Miller: The Good Mother
Anna, a divorcee, piano teacher and devoted mother, has been brought up in a family where achievement and self-discipline were they key values. But she has always yearned to be more passionate and expressive, both in her music and her life. When she falls in love with Leo, their relationship is so passionate that it threatens to destroy all that she holds dear.

To read chapters of these books and find out more about the authors, visit LoveReading.

We visited author and journalist Simon Winchester and found out that his bedside table is, in fact, a bath side table. These books are keeping him afloat:

Chloe Hooper: The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island
Palm Island may be the most beautiful tropical island in Australia, but its name is synonymous with violence. As Cameron Doomadgee, a 36-year-old resident of the island, was arrested for swearing at a white police officer, locked up and later found dead, the community is thrown into new depths of unrest, distrust and revenge.

Halldor Laxness: Independent People
Bjartus is a sheep farmer making a living from a blighted patch of land in Iceland. After 18 years of servitude to a master he despises, all he wants is to raise his flocks. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. But she too wants to live independently. When Bjartus throws her from the house on discovering she is pregnant, her more temperate determination is set against his stony will.

Rory MacLean: The Oatmeal Ark: From the Western Isles to a Promised Sea
The Reverend Hector Gillean is a ghost. At the start of the last century he built a ship and sailed west from the Hebrides to search for a promised land in the heart of the Canadian wilderness. His great-grandson retraces the voyage, 200 years later, through three generations of family history.


Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, picks her favourite sentence from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.


This week we visit The Travel Bookshop in London’s famous Notting Hill where Christian Rutherford recommends his favourite reading:
Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople – From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube
At the tender age of 18, Leigh Fermor set off for a 1,200 mile walk from Holland to Constantinople. In this book written some forty years after his travels, he recalls from memory the countryside, castles, rivers and fascinating people he met along the way.


THE GUESTS’ CHOICES
Elizabeth-Jane Howard has chosen Stella Gibbons as her literary heroine. Cold Comfort Farm is a story of Flora who has been expensively educated to do everything but earn her own living. When she is orphaned at 20, she decides her only option is to go and live with her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. What relatives though. Flora feels it incumbent upon her to bring order into the chaos.

Roger McGough wishes he had written Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the tales of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad. When Mole goes boating with the Water Rat instead of spring-cleaning, he discovers a new world. As well as the river and the Wild Wood, there is Toad's craze for fast travel which leads him and his friends on a whirl of trains, barges, gipsy caravans and motor cars and even into battle.

Anita Shreve picks Shirley Hazzard’s A Transit of Venus as her favourite. Caroline and Grace Bell, Australian orphan sisters, board after World War II at the home of a famous old English astronomer. Caroline’s love for a playwright ends in heartbreak, but worse is to come years later when a terrible confession upends her entire picture of her past.