We get stuck into some new fiction, starting with Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, a meditation on a future shaped by climate disaster and memory. We’re joined by Australian authors Madeleine Gray and Gretchen Shirm to take a look at Miranda Darling’s Fireweather, a poetic story of breakdown and resistance, and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night, a dreamy blend of folklore and philosophy.

BOOKS

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know, Jonathan Cape

Miranda Darling, Fireweather, Scribe

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night, (Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), Text

GUESTS

Gretchen Shirm, is a novelist and literary critic whose books include Having Cried Woolf and The Crying Room. Her latest, Out of the Woods, was published in April

Madeleine Gray, is a critic, arts writer, and novelist whose debut novel, Green Dot, was published in 2023, and whose latest novel, Chosen Family, will be out in November

GRETCHEN SHIRM'S TOP 100 LIST

Rachel Cusk, Outline trilogy

Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be

Vigdis Hjorth, Will and Testament

Tara June Winch, Swallow the Air

MADELEINE GRAY'S TOP 100 LIST

Ali Smith, How To Be Both

Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear

Jessica Love, Julian is a Mermaid

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Helen Garner, works

Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait

Erin Hortle, A Catalogue of Love

Michelle Arrow, The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia

A.S. Byatt, Possession

James Fenton, works

Richard Holmes, Footsteps

Robert Louis Stevenson, works

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Roi Huberman and Tim Jenkins
• Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown