World Book Club

This month World Book Club visits the Oxford Literary Festival in the elegant surroundings of Worcester College, part of the university and is talking to the hugely popular British author Robert Harris with an audience about the first of his bestselling Roman trilogy, Imperium. The setting is Ancient Rome, a city teeming with ambitious and ruthless men, but none more brilliant than a rising young lawyer Marcus Cicero who decides to gamble all on one of the most dramatic courtroom battles of all time. Scrupulously researched and vividly imagined Imperium brings to life the cutthroat politics and the timeless pursuit of power as one man seeks to attain supreme authority within the state.(Picture: Robert Harris. Credit: BBC.)

This month World Book Club are once again part of The Hay Literary Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. Harriett Gilbert and a Festival audience talk to the acclaimed Swiss writer Joël Dicker about his gripping and chart-topping novel The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. A famous American writer suddenly finds himself the main suspect in a 30 year-old cold case in his sleepy home town in New England. His former student, a novelist desperate for material, appears as his only saviour. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair is a fast-paced, tightly plotted, literary thriller, and an ingenious book within a book by a dazzling young writer.(Picture credit: Valery Wallace Studio.)

This month World Book Club are lucky enough to be in the beautiful old city of Cartagena in Colombia as part of the Cartagena Hay Festival of Literature. Harriett Gilbert will be talking to one of Colombia’s most acclaimed writers Laura Restrepo about her haunting novel Delirium and learning something about this stunning country’s troubled recent past.Returning home after a business trip to discover his beloved wife Agustina has gone mad her kindly husband Aguliar delves back into her shadowy past to try to understand what has happened. Eventually he discovers the key to her madness buried deep in a Colombian story of money, power and corruption.(Picture Laura Restrepo with Harriett Gilbert. Credit: BBC.)

We talk to the acclaimed Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard about A Death in the Family, volume one of his remarkable series of memoirs My Struggle.Knausgaard writes with painful honesty about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and dangerously unpredictable father, and then his bewilderment and grief on his father's death. Becoming a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. A Death in the Family is an exploration of the author’s past from which emerges a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives.(Photo: Karl Ove Knausgaard. Credit: Sam Barker)

This month World Book Club is talking to the acclaimed British writer Margaret Drabble about her remarkable novel The Millstone.At a time when illegitimacy is taboo, Rosamund Stacey is pregnant after a one-night stand. Despite her independence and academic brilliance, she is naïve and unworldly and the choices before her are daunting. She must adapt to life as a single mother, but in the perfection and helplessness of her baby she finds a depth of feeling she has never known before.The Millstone conjures a London of the sixties that is not quite yet swinging and where sexual liberation has not quite yet arrived.(Picture: Margaret Drabble. Photo credit: Ruth Corney.)

Russian writer Dostoyevsky’s haunting classic thriller, Crime and Punishment, is celebrating its 150th birthday this year. Consumed by the idea of his own special destiny, Rashkolnikov is drawn to commit a terrible crime. In the aftermath, he is dogged by madness, guilt and a calculating detective, and a feverish cat-and-mouse game unfolds. Speaking on behalf of the novel are acclaimed Russian writer Boris Akunin and Russian scholar Dr Sarah Young who will be discussing this timeless Russian classic with the audience in the room at Pushkin House and around the world.The three extracts of the book were taken from Oliver Ready’s translation by Penguin Books.A special edition of World Book Club this month at London’s elegant Pushkin House, the UK capital’s Russian cultural hub. This month, as part of the BBC’s Love to Read Campaign, presenter Harriett Gilbert is picking her favourite novel to discuss.(Photo credit: Alexander Aksakov, Getty Images)

This month World Book Club talks to the acclaimed Irish writer Anne Enright about her poignant Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering.In it Veronica, one of the nine surviving Hegarty siblings, is bringing her brother Liam home to Dublin to bury. He walked to his death in the sea in Brighton, his brain muddled by drink, his pockets filled with stones. As the Hegarty clan gathers to mourn at Liam’s funeral Veronica retraces the troubled history and the murky family secrets that have festered over the years and brought tragedy in their wake. A novel about love, death and the darkness of thwarted desire The Gathering has won admirers the world over.

Harriett Gilbert talks to the hugely acclaimed writer DBC Pierre about his best-selling first novel Vernon God Little. An absurdly humorous look at the misadventures of a Texas teen named Vernon Little whose best friend has just killed 16 of their classmates and himself. In the wake of the tragedy, the townspeople seek both answers and vengeance; because Vernon was the killer's closest friend, he becomes the focus of their fury.Hailed by the critics and lauded by readers for its riotous and scathing portrayal of America in an age of trial by media, materialism, and violence, Vernon God Little was an international sensation when it was first published in 2003 and awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize.(Photo: DBC Pierre outside BBC Old Broadcasting House)

We talking to acclaimed Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez about his dark and compelling novel The Sound of Things Falling. Vasquez explores the recent tortured history of his home country through a complex interweaving of personal stories and confronts the disastrous consequences of the war between the drugs cartels and government forces which played out so violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above.After witnessing a friend’s murder, Antonio discovers the many ways in which his own and other lives have been deformed by his country’s recent brutal past. His journey leads him back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change; a time before drug-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.(Photo: Juan Gabriel Vasquez. Credit: Hermance Triay)

This month we’re in The Book Lounge Bookshop in Cape Town, South Africa and talking to the Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng about his Man Asian Literary Prize-winning novel, The Garden of Evening Mists.This haunting tale, set in the jungles of Malaya during and after World War II, centres on Yun Ling, the sole survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in which her sister perished.Driven by the desire to honour her sister’s memory through the creation of a lush and sensuous garden Yun Ling falls into a relationship with the enigmatic Japanese gardener Aritomo and begins a journey into her past, inextricably linked with the secrets of her troubled country’s history.(Picture: Tan Twan Eng. Credit: Lloyd Smith.)