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Bookclub

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Led by James Naughtie, readers talk to acclaimed authors about their best-known novels

Led by James Naughtie, a group of readers talk to acclaimed authors about their best-known novels

BBC Radio 4 FM

James Naughtie

Ann Patchett

Dymphna Flynn

Bookclub: Ann Patchett - Bel Canto

Ann Patchett - Bel Canto

06/08/2017

BBC Radio 4 - Bookclub, Ann Patchett - Bel Canto

Ann Patchett talks to James Naughtie about her Orange Prize-winning novel Bel Canto.

American writer Ann Patchett talks to James Naughtie and a group of readers about her Orange Prize-winning novel Bel Canto.

Ann Patchett discusses her novel Bel Canto, which was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. 

Bel Canto is set in an unspecified Latin American country, where insurgents have stormed the vice-president's mansion during a diplomatic party, believing that they will capture the President himself. Unfortunately for the guerrillas, he has stayed home to watch his favourite soap opera, and they are left with a miscellaneous collection of hostages from various nations.

Celebrated soprano Roxane Coss is among those taken hostage and she strikes up a friendship with the opera-mad president of a Japanese electronics company who has long worshipped her from afar.

The novel is based on events in Peru in 1996 when a guerrilla group entered the Japanese ambassador's residence and seized nearly 600 hostages and demanded the release of a number of political prisoners. The resulting siege lasted four months.

In Bookclub Ann Patchett discusses the unlikely comedy in Bel Canto and how she wrote it just before 9/11, which she describes as a lifetime ago. 

Presented by James Naughtie and including a group of invited readers.

Presenter : James Naughtie
Interviewed guest : Ann Patchett
Producer : Dymphna Flynn

September's Bookclub choice : The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe (1992).

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