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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

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Jenny Westerhoff

Open Book: Life in a parallel New York with Hanya Yanagihara: Book highlights for Spring 2022

09/01/2022

Life in a parallel New York with Hanya Yanagihara: Book highlights for Spring 2022

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Life in a parallel New York with Hanya Yanagihara: Book highlights for Spring 2022

Hanya Yanagihara speaks to Chris Power about her new book, To Paradise.

Hanya Yanagihara speaks to Chris Power about her new book, To Paradise, and critic John Self highlights the books he's looking forward to in the first part of 2022.

To Paradise is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Hanya Yanagihara’s runaway success, A Little Life. It spans two hundred years of a New York both familiar and strange: a version of 1893 where gay marriage is legal; 1993 in midst of the AIDS epidemic; 2093 in a world devastated by climate change, epidemics and pandemics. Hanya talks to Chris Power about themes of men in love, exploitation and exercise of power, and why she chose to write about a pandemic before the emergence of Covid-19.

Helen Garnons-Williams, Publishing Director at Fig Tree chooses this week’s Editor’s Pick. She puts forward a compelling case for Wahala by Nikki May – a tale of three mixed-race friends living in London, whose lives are punctuated by glamour and revenge after the arrival of the shadowy Isobel.

Critic John Self highlights the books he’s most looking forward to in the next few months, including Monica Ali’s Love Marriage, Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers, and Lucy Caldwell's novel set during the blitz of Belfast, These Days. Plus, he brings recommendations for recent reissues such as Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of A Life –  the so-called ‘Knausgaard for the Russian Revolution’.

And Graeme Macrae Burnet picks R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self as the Book He’d Never Lend. He explains why the depiction of people trying on different personalities resonates with him and how the author influences his own work.

This Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
Washington Square by Henry James
Wahala by Nikki May
Love Marriage by Monica Ali
At The Table by Claire Powell
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
These Days by Lucy Caldwell
The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Brian Moore
Dance Move by Wendy Erskine
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Homesickness by Colin Barrett
The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky
The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
The Divided Self by R.D. Laing
Ulysses by James Joyce

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