Secret Life of Books25 Sep 2025

BONUS: Jennifer Egan on the Woman in White

As part of our ongoing “That’s Classic!” series, we're joined by the wonderful Jennifer Egan to chat about the sensational thriller The Woman in White.

Jennifer is one of the most loved, admired and critically acclaimed writers in America, with fans all over the world. Jennifer is a Pulitzer Prize winner and was President of the vitally important PEN America. She's the author of many books, including the brilliant, genre-defying Visit from the Goon Squad and its follow up The Candy House. There's more than a touch of gothic in her writing, alongside the compelling social realism, so when we asked her to choose a classic that matters, we were thrilled that she chose Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White.

This gripping page-turner and perennial bestseller was published between 1859-60 in Charles Dickens’ serial All the Year Round. It's a gothic page-tuner about a mysterious young woman dressed entirely in white, who becomes the key to a thrilling tale of emotional entrapment and gaslighting in Victorian England. Jennifer joins Sophie in a brilliant discussion of why The Woman in White is such a literary touchstone, paving the way for modern thrillers including Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

Avsnitt(150)

Secret Life of Edinburgh

SLOB is in Edinburgh for the International Book Festival. Join us on a walking tour of literary Edinburgh. From Mary Queen of Scots and James VI of Scotland, obsessed with witch hunts and an early ant...

1 Sep 59min

Secret Life of Trains 2 (Choo choo!)

This week SLOB went full steam ahead from London to Edinburgh, to appear live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We love classic books, and we love trains, so what better way to while away ...

31 Aug 37min

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

We’re aware that Chaucer’s epic poem Troilus and Criseyde written in the 1380s might be a tough sell to even the most devoted SLoB listener, but bear with us. Troilus and Criseyde is not a novel, but ...

25 Aug 1h 23min

Charlotte Higgins on Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War

Charlotte Higgins talks to Jonty about her new book, Ukrainian Lessons, which recounts her experiences the last four years reporting on the cultural life of a nation at war. Culture is never far from ...

21 Aug 50min

James Joyce 3: Ulysses

Ulysses is a vast novel - over a quarter of a million words. Yet it follows the action of less than 24 hours. To be fair, Joyce packs a lot into that 24 hours. Although our old friend Stephen Daedalus...

18 Aug 1h 9min

Greek Lessons by Han Kang

This week we take a – somewhat unplanned – detour from our James Joyce sequence, which we put on pause while we finished reading the book! We're taking the chance to include in our series on modern Od...

11 Aug 1h 8min

James Joyce 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

One evening in 1898, the 16-year-old James Joyce lost his virginity with a sex worker on a canal bank in Dublin. The event would become the main event in his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the A...

4 Aug 59min

Emily Wilson, the Odyssey and Why Epics Matter

We’ve been saving this one up for a special occasion – a live conversation with Professor Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of Homer’s Odyssey and the version on which Christopher Nolan’s film i...

3 Aug 34min