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Book of the Week

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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: Picnic Comma Lightning

Stephen Mangan

Laurence Scott

Elizabeth Burke

Alexandra Quinn

Book of the Week: Picnic Comma Lightning: Episode 2: The End of Things

Picnic Comma Lightning

Episode 2

Episode 2: The End of Things

The End of Things

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Picnic Comma Lightning, The End of Things

Bereavement forces you to consider how much things matter. Read by Stephen Mangan.

Bereavement forces you to consider how much things matter. The second episode of Laurence Scott's philosophical memoir. Read by Stephen Mangan.

An innovative examination of the nature of reality in the 21st century by award-winning author Laurence Scott - part personal memoir, part philosophical exploration. Read by Stephen Mangan.

Bereavement forces you to consider how much things matter. In this second episode, Laurence considers our relationship with the things around us. As he says, "When someone close to you is dying, you can begin to feel wary of their everyday belongings. You've heard horror stories about sorting through 'their things' in the weeks afterwards. You look with mounting unease at your mother's dressing gown, her slippers, her purse hanging, uncharacteristically unemployed, on the bathroom hook..."

When he was in his early thirties, Laurence Scott's parents died soon after one another, and he found his whole world altered beyond recognition. As he begins to navigate this new reality, he realises that in politics and public life, the nature of reality - what is true and what is fake - has become an urgent issue. Questions of how we experience the real world, how we access its truths, have become mainstream concerns. Today, in an age of online personas, alternative truths, constant surveillance and an increasingly hysterical news cycle, our realities are becoming more flimsy and more vulnerable than ever before.

Laurence Scott is a writer, broadcaster, academic and a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Arcadia in London. He is author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize, and was named the Sunday Times Thought Book of the Year. In 2011 he was named one of ten New Generation Thinkers by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC. 

Read by Stephen Mangan
Adapted by Elizabeth Burke
Produced by Alexandra Quinn
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4.

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A meditation on modern life, inspired by the death of author Laurence Scott's parents.

By Laurence Scott. Philosophical meditation on 21st-century reality, inspired by the death of the author's parents. Read by Stephen Mangan.

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