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 McCullaghProducer, Kate Evans and Sarah CorbettSound engineer, Roi Huberman and Tim JenkinsExecutive producer, Rhiannon Brown
