The same question is at the heart of three very different international novels on The Bookshelf this week, “What really happened”…

To a WWI soldier who has forgotten his name and identity in The Remembered Soldier by Dutch author Anjet Daanje?

To a fortune teller for the elite class in Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted?

When four high achieving American boys entered a cave, and one emerged terribly hurt, In Sameer Pandya’s Our Beautiful Boys?

Keep scrolling for a full list of all books mentioned on this week's program.

BOOKS

• Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier (translated from the Dutch by David McKay), Scribe
• Ben Okri, Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted, Apollo
• Sameer Pandya, Our Beautiful Boys, Bloomsbury

GUESTS

Tom Wright, theatre writer and adapter, and Artistic Associate at Belvoir Street Theatre.

Bronwyn Rivers, researcher and novelist whose debut, The Reunion was released this year. She also has a PhD on the 19th century novel.

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Bronwyn Rivers, The Reunion
• Max Porter, Grief is the Thing With Feathers
• Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Ben Okri, The Famished Road
• William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• William Shakespeare, As You Like It
• T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
• Ben Okri, The Freedom Artist
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
• Curzio Malaparte, The Skin
• Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
• Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Jackson Brodie Novel

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans & Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans & Salome Lines-Morison
• Sound Engineer, Simon Branthwaite & Tegan Nicholls
• Executive Producer, Rhiannon Brown