Oliver Burkeman and Sara Collins
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively, chosen by Sara Collins NUMBER GO UP: INSIDE CRYPTO'S WILD RISE AND STAGGERING FALL by Zeke Faux, chosen by Oliver Burkeman LORD JIM AT HOME by Dinah Brooke, chosen by Harriett Gilbert
"I'm writing a history of the world" - so begins the choice of novelist and broadcaster Sara Collins: Penelope Lively's Booker Prize-winning novel Moon Tiger. Claudia Hampton, a famous writer and historian, lies dying in a hospital bed, her mind flitting across the years of her remarkable life and the people she's known. Sara Collins loves the book's romance, its jagged structure, and its unlikeable heroine. Do the others agree? Sara is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, which won the Costa First Novel Award and was adapted for television in 2023. She was one of the hosts of the How to Write a Book Podcast and is a former judge of the Booker Prize.
As a newspaper columnist, for many years Oliver Burkeman wrote This Column Will Change Your Life in The Guardian. He is the bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and, more recently, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. His choice is a non-fiction book by the investigative journalist Zeke Faux about the characters who have made and lost billions in the wild and volatile world of cryptocurrency.
And Harriett's choice is Lord Jim at Home, a novel by Dinah Brooke. Giles Trenchard is born into a life of privilege, but also into a world of hidden cruelty and emotional deprivation. Everyone agrees it's brilliantly written, but how do Harriett's guests feel about its dark content?
Producer: Mair Bosworth
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. |
| 0:34.7 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, we're talking books. Books we've particularly enjoyed, or at least one of us has. We don't necessarily think the same. |
| 0:46.7 | Joining me today is Oliver Birkman, best-selling author of 4,000 weeks, and more recently, Meditations for Mortals, |
| 0:56.1 | four weeks to Embrace Your Limitations for mortals, four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. As a newspaper columnist for many years, Oliver wrote, |
| 1:01.2 | this column will change your life for The Guardian. With him is the novelist and screenwriter Sarah |
| 1:06.5 | Collins, author of The Confessions of Franny Langton, which won the Costa First Novel Award and was adapted by Sarah herself as a four-part TV drama. |
| 1:15.9 | Sarah co-hosted the How to Write a Book podcast, and she was a judge for last year's Booker Prize. |
| 1:22.7 | Sarah, would you start us off? What are you recommending as a good read? I am recommending Moon Tiger by |
| 1:29.1 | Penelope Lively. And I'm going to start with a confession, which is that I was very late to |
| 1:33.8 | Penelope Lively, and I'm ashamed of that, especially because I did judge last year's Booker. And I think |
... |
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