In her new children's novel "After Tomorrow" Gillian Cross explores the aftermath of 'Armageddon' Monday, when the banks collapse, sterling becomes worthless and industry crumbles, people lose their jobs and the hunger begins. The only hope for many is to escape through the Channel Tunnel and become refugees in France, a country that doesn't want them. She discusses writing dystopian novels set in the immediate future set with Mariella Frostrup and Young Adult author and children's book blogger Katherine Langrish.

A biography of Taiye Selasi's life and family to date would itself require a small novella just to encompass it. She is London born, American educated, but with a tremendous pull towards her parents' West African homeland. Her debut novel Ghana Must Go is a richly textured family saga documenting the fate of the Sai's, an equally polyglot family who grow up on America's East coast but remain in many ways also umbilically tied to the West of Africa.

Behind so many of our most popular operas and musicals lie books which, although famous in their time, have been superseded by those works and are forgotten about today. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is by the 19th century Russian author Nikolai Leskov, who Chekhov claimed was his favourite writer. His story of the love starved but brutal anti-heroine Katerina, who murders both her husband and stepfather was the inspiration behind one of the most famous and acclaimed operas of the 20th century by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.Writer and music broadcaster Stephen Johnson discusses Leskov's novella and its influence on one of the masterpieces of Russian music.

Producer: Andrea Kidd. Show less