BONUS: SLoB's Secret Crushes and Clandestine Encounters pt 1
It's Valentine's Day and love is quite literally in the air as the Secret Life of Books beams, via a complex network of satellites and data banks, to your ears. In this Bonus Episode, Sophie and Jonty...
14 Feb 202549min
Shakespeare does 'Succession': Rory Stewart on King Lear
“Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” King Lear is the Mount Everest of Theatre - a sprawling masterpiece of political turmoil, personal betrayal, horrifying gore and great poetry. It makes ‘Succession’...
11 Feb 202558min
Wizards, Hobbits and WWII: Dominic Sandbrook on The Lord of the Rings
One ring to rule them allOne ring to…Yes, SLoB finally turns its Sauron-like eye on what is thought to be the second best-selling novel of all time (after Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities): Lord of the Rin...
4 Feb 20251h 18min
Love and Beauty Bonus: Geraldine Brooks picks Gilead as the great modern classic
The Pulitzer Prize winner, fan-favorite Geraldine Brooks first read Gilead on a packed flight and found herself clambering over passengers for a Kleenex. Find out why Robinson’s quiet, meditative, mul...
31 Jan 202523min
Soldier Preachers, late-life love and Soapy the cat in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
Gilead, from 2004, by the American writer Marilynne Robinson, is a smash-hit novel about Calvinism, three generations of Congregationalist minister and a cat called Soapy. Unlikely trifecta through th...
28 Jan 20251h 4min
Jane Austen goes to the dark side: social turmoil and scandalous texting in Sense and Sensibility
If you think Jane Austen is light and bright and sparkling, think again. In Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel, Jane goes to the dark side. Listeners remembering Emma Thompson and Kate W...
21 Jan 20251h 15min
Cannes, a white mess jacket, and the pure joy of P.G. Wodehouse's "Right Ho, Jeeves"
Right Ho, Jeeves was the 34th novel by the British writer PG Wodehouse, written when he was - struggling writers take note - 52 years old. But you would never guess this. It is fresh, energetic, joyfu...
14 Jan 20251h 16min
The Craft of Writing, the Booker Prize from Australia: Charlotte Wood on My Name is Lucy Barton
Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton is a much-loved and perennially-read novel that has caught the attention of literally millions of readers worldwide. But it’s quiet, low-key book, about famil...
7 Jan 202550min
