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Open Book

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books, talking to authors and publishers and unearthing lost classics

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Open Book: Aminatta Forna presents Open Book

Aminatta Forna presents Open Book

19/08/2012

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Aminatta Forna presents Open Book

Aminatta Forna presents the best new fiction and non-fiction and talks to Pat Barker.

Writer and broadcaster Aminatta Forna talks to Pat Barker about Toby's Room, her latest novel set around World War I, plus Linda Grant reveals the questions authors hate.

Pat Barker won the Booker prize in 1995 for her novel The Ghost Road, the last in her Regeneration trilogy set during the First World War. Five years ago she returned to the Great War with the first in her new trilogy Life Class, based around the students studying at The Slade School for Art. Now she's publishing the second, Toby's Room, bringing back many of those original characters. Set in both 1912 and 1917, it bookends Life Class and follows the story of Elinor Brooke, and her journey to find the truth when her beloved brother Toby is reported "Missing, Believed Killed".

Over the years many writers find they are asked the same questions time and time again including - what does the title mean? how autobiographical is it? and where do your characters come from? Authors DJ Taylor and Linda Grant discuss the questions never to ask an author.

We continue our series exploring how writers have been inspired by the landscape. Jamie Andrews, lead curator of the British Library's Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands discusses the impact of industrialisation on our great literary classics from the novels Middlemarch and North and South and the poems of William Wordsworth to the lyrics of John Lennon.


Producer: Andrea Kidd.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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