World Book Club Folgen

English author A. S Byatt talks to an audience about her novel 'Possession'. First broadcast in March 2004(Photo: A S Byatt. Credit:BBC)

Xiaolu Guo talks about her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. The book was her first written in English and made prestigious fiction shortlists on publication in 2007.Twenty-three year old Zhuang – or Z as she’s called in England because no-one can pronounce her name – arrives to spend a year learning English. The loneliness and strangeness of the city are overwhelming, but as she struggles through the challenges of nouns and verbs and the oddities of English speech, she meets and falls in love with an older English man. When he invites her to ‘be my guest’ she brings round her suitcase and moves into his house. Written in broken English that subtly improves throughout the novel, with perfectly funny insights into English cultural quirks and her own Chinese background, this is a romantic comedy about two people who neither speak one another’s language nor understand one another’s culture.(Photo: Xiaolu Guo. Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images)

American writer Michael Chabon talks about his 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.From Jewish mysticism to Houdini to the Golden Age of Comic Books and WWII, Chabon’s immersive novel deals with escape and transformation through the lives of two Jewish boys in New York. Josef Kavalier makes an impossible escape from Prague in 1939, leaving his whole family behind but convinced he’s going to find a way to get them out too. He arrives in New York to stay with his cousin Sammy Klayman, and together the boys cook up a superhero to rival Superman – both banking on their comic book creation, The Escapist, to transform their lives and those around them, which in part he does. Their first cover depicts The Escapist punching Hitler in the face, and they wage war on him in their pages, but the personal impact of WWII is painfully inevitable.The novel touches on the personal scars left by vast political upheaval, and the damaging constraints of being unable to love freely and live a true and authentic life. Chabon’s prose is perfectly crafted – sometimes lyrical, sometimes intensely witty, and occasionally painfully heartbreaking.(Picture: Michael Chabon. Photo credit: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.)