This week Mariella speaks to the award-winning Australian writer Richard Flanagan about his latest novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, an epic tale with a dark heart inspired by his father's experience of surviving the Death Railway during WW2.

Also in the programme, agent Peter Straus explains why you should read Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens; Jeremy Dyson and friends celebrate cult author, Robert Aickman; and as an avalanche of self-help manuals hit bookshops, a look at what lies behind this phenomenon. Show less