Omid Djalili and Nikita Lalwani
Books and Authors
BBC
4.2 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A novel about compassion set against the backdrop of the Aberfan disaster is comedian and actor Omid Djalili's choice of a good read. A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe is a novel about a young man who becomes an embalmer and who goes straight from his graduation ceremony to help at the site of the tragedy in Aberfan to take care of the deceased's bodies. That experience is to shape the rest of his life and his relationships with his mother and wife as well as an early schoolfriend are all affected. Nikita Lalwani chooses a quirky book of short stories by Charles Yu called Third Class Superhero - the message of which seems to be it's OK to be mediocre. Harriett Gilbert's choice is Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter recently made into a film starring Olivia Coleman. It lays bare the complexities of motherhood and the mixed feelings it evokes.
Producer: Maggie Ayre for BBC Audio Bristol
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I'd like to quickly tell you about some others. |
| 0:05.2 | My name's Andy Martin and I'm the editor of a team of podcast producers at the BBC in Northern Ireland. |
| 0:11.3 | It's a job I really love because we get to tell the stories that really matter to people here, |
| 0:16.3 | but which also resonate and apply to listeners around the world. |
| 0:19.6 | And because the team is such a diverse |
| 0:21.2 | range of skills and strengths, we have trained journalists, people who love digging through |
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| 0:37.1 | from all around the UK. BBC Sounds where you'll find plenty more fascinating stories from all around the UK. |
| 0:40.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:44.3 | Hello, I'm Harriet Gilbert. Thank you for downloading a good read, the podcasts, |
| 0:49.2 | where two guests and I recommend books we love and describe why we love them. |
| 0:53.5 | We don't always see eye to eye, but I hope you'll find some great reading suggestions here. |
| 0:59.0 | Hello, it's lovely to be back and joined today first by the actor and stand-up, Omed Jalili. |
| 1:05.0 | Omid's decades-long movie career encompasses Pirates of the Caribbean and Mamma Mia, here we go again. |
| 1:12.6 | On TV, he's appeared in everything from Dickensian to his dark materials and on stage, Omid starred as Fagin in Oliver |
| 1:18.7 | and Tevia in Fiddler on the roof. From now till December he's crisscrossing the country with |
| 1:24.1 | his Good Times tour. With Omid is the novelist and screenwriter Nikita Lalwani, |
| 1:29.7 | whose books include The Village and, most recently, You People, set in a West London pizzeria, |
| 1:35.6 | none of whose multinational staff is actually Italian. As a screenwriter, Nikita contributed to Stephen |
| 1:41.1 | Merchant's comedy thriller for the BBC, The Outlaws. |
| 1:45.8 | Ahmed Jalili, will you start us off? What is your choice of a good read? |
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