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BBC Radio 4 LW

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

BBC Radio 4 FM

Mariella Frostrup

Anita Shreve

Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Stott

Adam Freudenheim

Hilary Dunn

Open Book: Anita Shreve, Rebecca Mead

23/03/2014

Anita Shreve, Rebecca Mead

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Anita Shreve, Rebecca Mead

Anita Shreve discusses her new novel The Lives of Stella Bain, and the joys of Middlemarch

Anita Shreve discusses her latest novel The Lives of Stella Bain, and a look at the enduring appeal of George Eliot's Middlemarch with writers Rebecca Mead and Rebecca Stott.

Anita Shreve, best-selling author of The Pilot's Wife, talks to Mariella Frostrup about her latest novel The Lives of Stella Bain, the follow up to a previous novel, All He Ever Wanted. Women who suffered from shell shock as a result of nursing soldiers wounded on the front line during WW1 have been neglected by historians; this novel places their experience centre stage through telling the story of amnesia victim, Stella Bain.

Rebecca Mead's The Road to Middlemarch is part memoir, part biography, part literary criticism and explores Mead's life long love affair with George Eliot's Middlemarch which she first read when she was 17 and which she describes as the novel "she cannot imagine living her life without." She discusses with novelist and academic Rebecca Stott how the novel continues to address fundamental questions about life and love nearly 150 years after it was first written. Rebecca Stott brings her own treasured copy of Middlemarch into the studio - annotated by herself when she was 19 and and subsequently by her daughter also aged 19 - and handed down through the generations like a family bible.

Continuing our series on Insider Reading, in which an industry insider provides his or her top tip for a great read, publisher and managing director of Pushkin Press Adam Freudenheim recommends "Diary of The Fall" by Michel Laub - one of Granta's twenty "Best of Young Brazilian Novelists."

And a reading from a gripping debut novel, Decoded by best selling Chinese writer Mai Jia. Described as "the most popular writer in the world you have never heard of" his books sell millions of copies in his native China, where he has won every major award including the coveted Mao Dun Award. This is the first novel to be published in English by one of China's greatest and most popular contemporary writers.

Producer: Hilary Dunn.

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