Anne Tyler's writing career spans fifty years and twenty novels, including Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist and A Patchwork Planet. She's a bestselling author who has won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critic Circle Award. Novelists, including Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle, love her work. In a rare interview she talks to Mariella Frostrup about her new novel, her twentieth, A Spool of Blue Thread.

Also, the captivating story of the novel lost for over forty years: Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower reveals why she gave up writing, and her literary admirer Eimear McBride tells Mariella why she finds Harrower's novels an acutely observed portrait of our most intimate relationships.

And Dr Sarah Dillon is back with another undercover investigation into the workings of our classic prose. In Dame Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we see how we, as readers, are just as gullible to Miss Brodie's charms as her students. Show less