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BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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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

BBC Radio 4 LW

Mariella Frostrup

Anne Tyler

Elizabeth Harrower

Eimear McBride

Sarah Dillon

Open Book: Anne Tyler on her new novel A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler on her new novel A Spool of Blue Thread

15/02/2015

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Anne Tyler on her new novel A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler talks to Mariella Frostrup about her new novel A Spool of Blue Thread.

Anne Tyler on her new novel A Spool of Blue Thread, Elizabeth Harrower on publishing again after four decades and a close reading of Muriel Spark's manipulative Miss Jean Brodie.

Anne Tyler's writing career spans fifty years and twenty novels, including Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist and A Patchwork Planet. She's a bestselling author who has won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critic Circle Award. Novelists, including Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle, love her work. In a rare interview she talks to Mariella Frostrup about her new novel, her twentieth, A Spool of Blue Thread.

Also, the captivating story of the novel lost for over forty years: Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower reveals why she gave up writing, and her literary admirer Eimear McBride tells Mariella why she finds Harrower's novels an acutely observed portrait of our most intimate relationships.

And Dr Sarah Dillon is back with another undercover investigation into the workings of our classic prose. In Dame Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we see how we, as readers, are just as gullible to Miss Brodie's charms as her students.

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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Anne Tyler on her new novel A Spool of Blue Thread

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