Episode 7

Joining Mariella Frostrup on the sofa this week are Gervase Phinn with his new book, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Stars; Kate Summerscale with her new book, The Suspicion of Mr. Whicher; and Clive James and his new book, Angels Over Elsinore.

If you liked Gervase Phinn’s Twinkle, Twinkle Little Stars and are after further heart-warming tales with a touch of the rural idyll, here are a couple more you might like:

James Herriot: All Creatures Great and Small
Gervase Phinn is frequently labelled the’ James Herriot of schools’ so what better book to get tucked into than an actual Herriot! All Creatures Great and Small contains the first two much-loved and hilarious autobiographical tales of the Yorkshire vet as he goes from adventure to misadventure. The books are laced with acute observations of both the animals he encounters and the local characters.

Brian Viner: Tales of the Country
Tales of the Country follows journalist Brian Viner and his family as they tackle a sever case of ‘metropause’ by upping sticks and leaving the coffee bars and delis of North London for rural Herefordshire. Viner throws himself into his new life with gusto, making friends with a cast of characters in the local pub, while never quite giving up the search for a decent cappuccino.


If you liked Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicion of Mr. Whicher and we’ve whetted your appetite for Victorian whodunnits, why not try these:

Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone
This is widely considered to be the first modern English detective novel. It involves a young heiress, a stolen yellow diamond, a number of suspects, an English country house, red herrings and one detective from Scotland Yard to solve the mystery.

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet
This is the novel that introduced one of the greatest detectives in literature, Sherlock Holmes, and his sidekick Dr Watson. In the first case of that most famous of investigative partnerships, Holmes’s brilliant deductive powers are truly put to the test. A dead man is discovered in a London house, his face contorted with horror and a word written on a wall in blood.


If you liked Clive James’s Angels Over Elsinore and the music is calling, here are a couple more to inspire you even further:

Stephen Fry: The Ode Less Travelled
Fry believes that if you can speak and read English, you can write poetry. In The Ode Less Travelled he reveals the delight to be had from metre, rhyme and verse forms and offers a step by step guide in how to turn the prosaic into the poetic.

The Great Modern Poets
An excellent introduction to poetry, The Great Modern Poets contains over 150 poems from the tinest poets of the 20th and 21st century. From W H Auden to Seamus Heaney, T S Eliot to Sylvia Plath, it’s a wide ranging collection that shows all that poetry has to offer.



Bedside read with Candace Bushnell
The ever-glamorous author and journalist Candace Bushnell opens the doors to her boudoir to reveal what books she keeps on her bedside table:

Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks
Translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929, Buddenbrooks was first published in Germany in 1900. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain.

John Updike: The Witches of Eastwick
In a small New England town in that hectic era when the sixties turned into the seventies, there lived three witches. Alexandra Spoffard, a sculptress, could create thunderstorms. Jane Smart, a cellist, could fly. The local gossip columnist, Sukie Rougemont, could turn milk into cream. Divorced but hardly celibate, the wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose strobe-lit hot tub room became the scene of satanic pleasures.

Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers
After the death of old Dr Grantly, a bitter struggle begins over who will succeed him as Bishop of Barchester. And when the decision is finally made to appoint the evangelical Dr Proudie, rather than the son of the old bishop, Archdeacon Grantly, resentment and suspicion threaten to cause deep divisions within the diocese. Trollope's masterly depiction of the plotting and back-stabbing that ensues lies at the heart of one of the most vivid and comic of his Barsetshire novels, peopled by such very different figures as the saintly Warden of Hiram's Hospital, Septimus Harding, the ineffectual but well-meaning new bishop and his terrifying wife, and the oily chaplain Mr Slope who has designs on Mr Harding's daughter.


Featured Bookshop: Gosh!
This week we pay a visit to Gosh! in Central London who specialise in graphic novels and comics. Will Kane from Gosh! gives us his book club recommendation:

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell: From Hell
Legendary comics writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell have created a gripping, hallucinatory piece of crime fiction about Jack the Ripper. Detailing the events that led up to the Whitechapel murders and the cover-up that followed, From Hell has become a modern masterpiece of crime noir and historical fiction.


Fine Line: Aravind Adiga
This week the Man Booker Prize -winning author Aravind Adiga tells us why his favourite line comes from Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow

Write Place with Jon Ronson
Author and journalist Jon Ronson shows us where he has been writing his books, including Them: Adventures with Extremists and Clubbed Class.

Guests’ literary heroes and heroines:
Every week our guests tell us who their heroes and heroines are from the literary world. This week Gervase Phinn’s favourite character comes from Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn; Kate Summerscale finds literary heroism from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist; and Clive James’s favourite character is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But what characters have they chosen as their literary heroes and heroines?

To read the opening extracts of these books and find out more about the authors, visit Lovereading.co.uk.