Johny Pitts talks to Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk about his prescient new novel, Nights of Plague. An atmospheric and richly detailed portrait of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the psychology of a pandemic.

Set on an island in the Mediterranean in 1901, the bubonic plague takes hold, as the daughter of a deposed sultan, Princess Pakize, her husband, and a famous doctor Bonkowski Pasha, arrive on a mission to persuade the population to abide by quarantine rules.

Johny also talks to actor Paterson Joseph about the extraordinary life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, a freed slave and later prominent Black activist in Georgian Britain, who inspired his debut novel, The Secret Diaries of Ignatius Sancho. And the author of Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters, has chosen Imogen Binnie’s ground-breaking novel, Nevada, as her Book I'd Never Lend.

Booklist – Thursday 29 September

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
The Plague by Albert Camus
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Black England: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Gerzina
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. Edited by Vincent Carretta
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters Nevada by Imogen Binnie Show less