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World Book Club: Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station

Discussion & Talk

Ben Lerner

03/09/2022 GMT

Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station

BBC World Service - World Book Club, Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station

Searingly funny coming-of-age novel set in Madrid

Next in the series exploring The Exuberance of Youth World Book Club talks to the award-winning American author Ben Lerner about his beguiling debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station.

Brilliant, unreliable, young American poet Adam Gordon is on a fellowship in Madrid, where he is struggling to establish his identity and dazzle his contemporaries.

Instead of studying, his research becomes a meditation on authenticity - are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain, especially the two clever and beautiful women he falls for, as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? In the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid train bombings has he participated in history or merely watch it pass him by?

Winner of the Believer Book Award and a Guardian Book of the Year from 2012 which marked the launch a major new literary talent.

(Picture: Ben Lerner. Photo credit: Catherine Barnett.)

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