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The Book Café: 14/03/2011

14/03/2011

BBC Radio Scotland - The Book Café, 14/03/2011

How a Scottish novel became an ebook sensation weeks before its print debut.

Kilmarnock-born writer Gordon Ferris's novel, The Hanging Shed, has just become a number one bestseller electronically, weeks before it was released in print. E books are changing the literary landscape even faster than expected, so we'll be asking whether we should be cheered by this success story, because traditionally non-bestselling authors can now get a piece of the publishing pie, or whether it signals an ever more bleak prospect for bookshops and printed books.

Nobel Prize winners Toni Morrison and J M Coetzee are fans of hers- and fans don't come much bigger than that. We meet the best writer most of us have never heard of. And she lives right under our noses in Scotland.


Rosemary Goring, Literary Editor of The Herald gives us her pick of the best Scottish fiction out this spring.


Johanna Adorjan's grandparents survived the Holocaust and escaped the tumult of Hungary during the uprising of 1956, only to commit suicide together in 1991, rather than allow one to die before the other. Sixteen years after their death, Johanna set out to get to know them better and to try to understand the reasons behind that devastating decision. We'll be hearing about her moving and thoughtful memoir, An Enduring Love.


And- as the year of Books on the BBC continues, we'll be reviewing BBC2's forthcoming version of Michel Faber's best-selling epic The Crimson Petal and the White and asking whether television adaptations prompt viewers to then pick up the book, or are they a lazy way of ticking one more novel off the To Read list?

Produced by Serena Field.

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