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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

Tony Parsons

Henry Sutton

Ted Hodgkinson

Alice Greenway

Open Book: 11/05/2014

11/05/2014

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, 11/05/2014

Tony Parsons talks to Mariella Frostrup about why he turned to crime.

Tony Parsons on his first novel The Murder Bag, and why he and Henry Sutton find crime appeals. Plus, Alice Greenway goes ornithological, and why literature matters in Kurdistan.

Tony Parsons talks about why he's turned to crime, what he learnt from his time with the vice squad and why it's okay for a detective to have a heart these days. He's joined by fellow writer and academic Henry Sutton to chew over why literary lions are keen to write crime novels these days and why they constantly appeal.

Ted Hodgkinson is just back from the third International Literature Festival in Erbil, in Kurdistan. He reveals a city steeped in writing and poetry and a rich cultural heritage that continues to flourish despite a sometimes turbulent and war torn history.

Alice Greenway's new novel, The Bird Skinner, is set partly in The Solomon Islands and partly off Maine. She explains why her black sheep of an ornithologist grand-father, who spent his war years in the Far East and found time to observe birds amid the fighting, inspired her to write a story of love, birds and collateral war damage.

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11/05/2014

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