Bookclub

James Naughtie and readers talk to the Irish writer Roddy Doyle about his Booker prize winning novel Paddy Clarke HA HA HA. In the novel ten year old Paddy rampages through the streets of suburban Dublin with a pack of like-minded boys, playing cowboys and Indians, etching their names in wet concrete and lighting fires. To get into the character of the boy Roddy took himself into his own childhood memories. He walked round Dublin and tried to remember how the City looked from a child's eye view, and he saw things he hadn't seen since he was ten, and realised that children don't discriminate in their outlook.In the book Doyle captures the sensations and speech patterns of a ten year old without resorting to sentimentality. This is a book that reminds you of your own childhood, the fun things, the scary, and the incomprehensible. It's a portrayal of ordinary family life - the father learning to drive is just one comic set piece; but there's also the brutality of the school playground and the unvarnished but slow realisation that Paddy's parents' marriage is falling apart.Roddy Doyle wrote this book when he was still a teacher and his son was newly born. He finished longer passages during the Christmas and Easter holidays when he had more time; and wrote shorter sections when his son was napping.Roddy Doyle is known for the sharp edged street humour in previous books such as the Commitments and the Snapper, and in the programme he shows he still has that trademark Dublin wit. James Naughtie chairs the programme.November's Bookclub choice : 'Thomas Hardy - Time Torn Man' by Claire Tomalin Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to the Canadian writer Yann Martel about his novel Life of Pi, which won the 2002 Man Booker prize and went on to be a global phenomenon. James Naughtie chairs the programme.October's Bookclub choice : 'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha' by Roddy DoyleProducer : Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to American writer Siri Hustvedt about her novel What I Loved.Siri Hustvedt's novel is part love story, thriller, and part family saga.It's set in New York's glamorous art world, and starts in 1975 when an art historian buys a remarkable painting of a woman and tracks down the artist. The two men become good friends and their lives intertwine as their sons grow up together. In the boys' teenage years the worlds of the two families fall apart and the novel changes tack, as a mystery develops in the second half of the book that the reader has no idea about in the novel's early stages.This is a novel about love and loss that became a word-of-mouth success with book groups, and went on to become a world wide bestseller after its first publication in 2003.James Naughtie chairs the programme.September's Bookclub choice : 'Life of Pi' by Yann Martel.Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to the Swedish thriller writer Henning Mankell about his novel Sidetracked, featuring his detective Kurt Wallander. Henning Mankell's character is now in the pantheon of fictional detectives. Like Conan Doyle before him, Mankell receives letters from readers addressed to Kurt Wallander. They think he's real because he's like us. He's a detective who suffers angst about the way the world is changing, readers witness his depressions and his difficult relationships with women. Mankell calls it the 'diabetes syndrome'. Can you imagine, he says, James Bond stopping mid-action for a shot of insulin?Mankell was already a well known writer in Sweden before he found worldwide fame with Wallander. He created Wallander to write about the changes in Swedish society. Always known for its generous welfare state and its tolerance, Mankell was dismayed to see a certain xenophobia developing with race crimes against immigrants in the early nineties. For him, the best way to explore this issue was within a crime story, and so he needed a detective to solve the mystery.Recorded with a group of twenty-five readers in the studio, Bookclub with Henning Mankell is a lively and entertaining discussion that belies any stereotype of Swedish moroseness - with a writer considering his best known creation. James Naughtie chairs the programme.August's Bookclub choice : 'What I Loved' by Siri Hustvedt.Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to the celebrated author Lynne Reid Banks about her first novel, The L-Shaped Room. It was an instant success and has been in print ever since it was published exactly fifty years ago. It's the story of Jane, a single young woman who falls pregnant. Reading The L-Shaped Room again in 2010, it's easy to forget what a taboo it was to be pregnant and unmarried in the early 1960s. Jane is a brave character who decides to bring up the baby by herself, after her father throws her out. But her feelings are mixed, and as almost a punishment to herself she rents a grubby L-shaped room at the top of a run- down boarding house in Fulham.Gradually as she settles in and does up the room, she makes friends, and in tandem with the improvements to her surroundings, her life gets better.This is a novel that has inspired young women to independence, whatever their situations. Readers in the audience describe what this book means to them - from a woman whose own mother brought her up single-handedly to another who says that the line about Jane having to wear a wedding ring 'brought it all back.'Lynne Reid Banks was one of the first female news-reporters at ITN. Although she complained she was always given 'soft stories' she did not consider herself a feminist at the time, which is ironic, as the L-Shaped Room is considered as a feminist novel. Recorded with a group of twenty-five readers in the studio, Bookclub with Lynne Reid Banks is a lively discussion with a writer looking back at the book that changed her life as well as many readers' lives. James Naughtie chairs the programme. July's Bookclub choice : Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most prominent writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Fiction, joins James Naughtie and readers to discuss My Name is Red.The novel is a complicated mixture of murder mystery, fairy tale and exploration of the medieval world of the Turkish miniaturist painter. The novel begins - surreally - from the point of view of the murdered man; his body thrown down the bottom of a well, he waits for this death to be discovered. The story is then taken up by a myriad of characters, which include a coin and a horse, as well as the colour Red itself. They recount a chapter at least each - in fact this book has twenty narrators and yet, as James Naughtie and readers testify, it is a page-turner. My Name is Red is the most popular of Pamuk's in the English speaking world, due he says to the whodunnit element, but also to the global appeal of the art.Orhan Pamuk discloses how as a young man he longed to be a painter, and so as a successful writer, it was a natural progression to write about the joys of painting, and to explore how an artist feels as their hands move across the page.His reputation as the funny man of his family is also in evidence. Despite his intellectual credentials, humour is an important tool for him. He says he doesn't like writing a serious book, and if the reader isn't smiling when he reads his work, then he feels guilty. June's Bookclub choice : The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to Jeanette Winterson about her breakthrough first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, about a girl growing up in an Evangelical Christian group.This Spring Jeanette is celebrating twenty five years since the book was first published - the question the book has always raised is how much of it is autobiographical? Because there are distinct parallels, the main character is called Jeanette, she lives in the same kind of Northern mill town and had a similar story.Jeanette Winterson will be talking to James Naughtie and readers about how fact meets fiction, and how she looks at this book as a kind of cover story of her own life. Adopted into a Pentecostal family, the fictional Jeanette is brought up to be a missionary and encouraged to preach from an early age; but when she falls in love with another girl, she decides to leave her beloved community and her home. Jeanette explains how this event is not the point of the story, but pivotal to it. Now on the curriculum for English at AS Level, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a warm and - perhaps surprisingly - very funny study of a girl setting out on her path in life.Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to Canadian author Douglas Coupland about his cult novel Generation X. First published in 1991, it became a worldwide bestseller and defined a generation. Set during a time of yuppies and youth unemployment, the characters in Generation X are all in their late 20s, highly educated but with no ambition - they work in bars, and tell each other stories. This is the novel that made 'McJob' a popular term; and looking back at the novel Douglas speaks movingly of his own struggle as he set out to be a writer.

World-wide bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith meets readers to discuss the first in his series of humorous novels set in Edinburgh - 44 Scotland Street. The presenter is James Naughtie.The book tells the story of the interlocking lives of the inhabitants of adjoining flats in a house in the Georgian New Town of Edinburgh - their comic adventures, their foibles and accidents, their chance criss-crossings day-to-day.McCall Smith talks about the challenges of writing one thousand words a day, and how readers would advise him on where to take the story next, and what they thought he should do with characters they didn't like. He also explains how a few real people - novelist Ian Rankin, art gallery owner Guy Peploe - turned up in the stories.January's Bookclub choice: Unreliable Memoirs (Vol 1) by Clive James Producer: Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to celebrated American author John Irving about his novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. The novel starts with a shock - the eponymous hero hits a foul ball in a baseball match and kills his best friend's mother. It then moves through to spooky premonitions during an amateur performance of A Christmas Carol, to a drunken psychiatrist driving down school steps, to a bloody end during the Vietnam war. Yet there is pattern and meaning in such bizarre antics, and part of the fun for the reader is to work them out. Irving reveals the mysteries of one of fiction's most extraordinary characters, Owen Meany - the little guy with the falsetto voice.