Nicci Gerrard and Sean French
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Books featured:
True Grit by Charles Portis Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
Nicci Gerrard and Sean French write collectively as Nicci French. They not only write together, they're also a married couple and they love to read.
Sean chooses True Grit by Charles Portis, better known for the film versions with John Wayne and Jeff Bridges. But Sean passionately believes that to really experience the brilliance of the story you have to read the book, in which the 14 year old female protagonist hires a gunslinger to track down her father's killer.
Harriett's choice is a story of mental illness and family fallout. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason documents the life of Martha, who seems to be in permanent self-destruct mode and is unaware of the effects her behaviour have on those around her.
Nicci picks Tove Jansson's Moominland Midwinter, a book she read and loved as a child and continues to love today. Unlike Jansson's other books, which are set in summer, this story set in deep dark winter is a coming of age story about taking responsibility and conquering fears.
Producer: Maggie Ayre
Photo copyright Johnny Ring
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Things just swirling around my head. |
| 0:03.6 | Am I really the product of this? |
| 0:06.1 | Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests. |
| 0:11.0 | Little did I know what more was to come. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Jenny Clemen and in the new series of The Gift, |
| 0:17.5 | we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database. |
| 0:22.8 | They didn't know that I was different. |
| 0:25.7 | You had kids together. |
| 0:27.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:27.5 | Then you met. |
| 0:28.3 | Then we met. |
| 0:29.2 | The Gift. |
| 0:30.1 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.3 | BBC Sounds, music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:39.0 | Hello, it's good to be back, eager to share with you books we love. |
| 0:43.4 | My guest today is a strange, two-headed sort of creature |
| 0:46.3 | in that I'm joined by the massively best-selling author, Nikki French, |
| 0:50.6 | whose psychological thrillers have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. The most |
| 0:56.0 | recent, the last days of Kira Mullen, has just come out. But Nikki French is, as you may |
| 1:02.1 | well know, the joint pseudonym of two people, Nikki Gerard and Sean French, both authors in their |
| 1:07.8 | own right. And incidentally, or perhaps not incidentally, as well as being a writing |
| 1:12.1 | partnership, they're a married couple. And I'm going to go to the husband of the couple first. |
... |
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