Episodes

  • Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
    Oct 3 2024

    Our Missing Hearts is the third novel by the American author Celeste Ng. It was published in 2022 by Penguin Press. The novel follows Noah Gardner (known as Bird) on a bus trip from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lives with his father, to New York City in search for his mother. The novel takes place in a dystopian future under PACT (The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act)

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    31 mins
  • A Chat with Rachel Sargeant author of the Gloucestershire Crime Series
    Sep 4 2024

    Rachel Sargeant is the author of The Roommates, The Good Teacher, and The Perfect Neighbours. She also writes the Gloucestershire Crime Series, which includes Her Deadly Friend and Her Charming Man.

    She won Writing Magazine’s Crime Short Story competition and has been shortlisted in various competitions including the Bristol Short Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in My Weekly and the Saucy Shorts series by Accent Press.

    She is a graduate of Aberystwyth University and holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham. She provides bespoke critiques for Henshaw Press short story competition entrants and is a judge in the quarterly competitions. After many years in Germany, she now lives in Gloucestershire with her family. Her hobbies are visiting country houses and coffee shops, and going to the theatre.

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    36 mins
  • Hard By a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili
    Aug 30 2024

    Shortlisted for the Wilbur & Niso Smith Adventure Prize for Fiction - could this be the winner?


    An extraordinary tale of family, scarifice and our never-ceasing battle with the past, Vardiashvili's mesmerising and unique novel about a boy looking for his father who's returned to his native Georgia for the first time since the war blends gripping mystery with questions about how we remember and why we forget.



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    30 mins
  • Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang
    Aug 5 2024

    Athena Liu is a literary darling.
    June Hayward is literally nobody.

    But when June just happens to witness Athena die in a freak accident, she realises now is her chance to find fame.So what if that means stealing her friend’s work?
    So what if that means creating a new, racially ambiguous identity?
    So what if a social media scandal is about to blow her cover?

    As her lies mount up and threaten her stolen success, how far will June go to keep what she thinks she deserves…

    This is one hell of a story. It’s just not hers to tell.

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    34 mins
  • Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
    Jul 1 2024
    Is your ability to focus and pay attention in free fall? You are not alone. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for just three minutes. But it’s not your fault. Your attention didn’t collapse. It has been stolen. Internationally bestselling author Johann Hari shows twelve deep factors harming our focus. Once we understand them, together, we can take back our minds.
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    40 mins
  • The Dust That Falls From Dreams by Louis de Bernieres
    May 31 2024
    In the brief golden years of King Edward VII's reign, Rosie McCosh and her three very different sisters are growing up in an eccentric household in Kent, with their neighbours the Pitt boys on one side and the Pendennis boys on the other. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?
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    37 mins
  • Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
    May 1 2024
    Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End is a 2014 non-fiction book by American surgeon Atul Gawande. The book addresses end-of-life care, hospice care, and also contains Gawande's reflections and personal stories. He suggests that medical care should focus on well-being rather than survival.
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    35 mins
  • The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
    Apr 8 2024
    Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella's life - an emptiness once filled by love. So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work.
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    34 mins