The Bookshelf
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What are you reading, loving or being challenged by? We review the latest in fiction for dedicated readers and for those who wish they read more.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Aug 20, 2021 • 54min
Why you should read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (and meet his feistiest character)
Boastful, funny, clever, skilled and much maligned: meet Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath, both his fourteenth-century invention and a fresh remaking of her in Karen Brooks' The Good Wife of Bath. Also, the feelgood book of the year, with Sarah Winman's Still Life. Mediaeval literature specialist Louise D'Arcens and novelist Robert Gott join Kate for a lively discussion.
Aug 13, 2021 • 54min
Wolves, ghosts and a great flood: scary things in books
Broadcaster and journalist Melanie Tait joins Kate to talk wild empathy, in Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves. There are also reviews of Jennifer Mills' The Airways and Jessie Greengrass's The High House; the Bookshelf that Made English writer Sunjeev Sahota, and new poetry from Luke Currie-Richardson. (Cassie is away this week.)
Aug 6, 2021 • 54min
Outraged tweeters, miniature soldiers and the flooded canals of Venice
Kate and Cassie join guests Larissa Behrendt and Tiger Webb as Irish writer John Boyne takes on the Twittersphere; Nick Earls spins a tale that takes us from Vienna during the Napoleonic Wars through Russia in 1916 and on to contemporary Alaska and Hong Kong; and in Christine Mangan’s Palace of the Drowned we're in a wet and spooky Venice.
