The Book Club

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Lionel Shriver, whose new novel A Better Life offers among other things a savage send-up of liberal pieties on immigration. I asked Lionel what she was trying to do with the book (why make the argument, for instance, in a novel rather than an op-ed?), whether New York's immigration law really is as nutty as her story paints it, and how she reacts to the opprobrium that this sort of to-the-moment writing stirs up.
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My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Jane Rogoyska, whose new book Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War tells the bloody story of the Second World War through the lens of Paris's Hotel Lutetia – following a cast of exiled intellectuals through the febrile 1930s, the increasing horrors of the war and occupation, through to the devastating aftermath as waves of prisoners returned from the camps. She tells me how she came to this unusual approach, how the connections between her cast of characters proliferated, how close Samuel Beckett came to a concentration camp – and about falling a little bit in love with Walter Benjamin.
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My guest this week is Francis Spufford, whose fabulous new novel Nonesuch is a fantasy adventure set during the Blitz containing magical Nazis, nerdy TV techs and honest-to-goodness angels. He tells me about fantasy world-building and historical research, the pleasures and pitfalls of writing a female protagonist, why C S Lewis is as influential as Tolkien — and supersizing Dr Manhattan.

You can read Philip Hensher's review of Nonesuch here.
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My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the philosophy professor Hanna Pickard, whose new book is What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction. She tells me why we need a new approach to ‘the puzzle of addiction’. She says the idea that addicts are helplessly in thrall to the compulsions of a ‘broken brain’ is wrong, that we need to understand how sometimes using even if it's looks like killing you can make a sort of sense – and describes how her own one-off experience of morphine set her on the path of trying to change the way we think about drugs.
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In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Eric Schlosser, the investigative journalist whose Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is being reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic 25 years after its first publication. He tells me what’s changed and what hasn’t since he first published this groundbreaking exposé of fast food’s effects on so many aspects of American society, why he was destined to suffer the fate of Upton Sinclair, how Keir Starmer fits in – and how he proudly built a chapter around six vital words.
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