Robin Ince and Philip Hensher

A Good Read

BBC

Arts, Books

4.2 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week's books are:

Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy, chosen by comedian Robin Ince Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, chosen by Harriett Gilbert Esther Waters by George Moore, chosen by writer Philip Hensher

Producer Sally Heaven, BBC Audio Bristol

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:07.2	Things just swirling around my head.
0:09.6	Am I really the product of this?
0:12.1	Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.
0:17.0	Little did I know what more was to come.
0:19.5	I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift,
0:23.6	we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database.
0:28.8	They did know that I was different.
0:31.7	You had kids together.
0:33.0	Yeah.
0:33.5	Then you met.
0:35.2	The Gift.
0:36.1	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:39.8	As you may well know by now, this has been designated the National Year of Reading.
0:44.9	And if you're wondering what to read, you're in the right place. Because with me to tell you about books they love are first, the writer, comedian and broadcaster Robin Ince.
0:52.9	Author most recently of Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal,
0:57.7	My Adventures in Neurodiversity, and a debut collection of poems,
1:01.9	Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth.
1:04.5	With him is the novelist Philip Hensher,
1:07.0	whose scandalous political fiction Kitchen Venom,
1:10.1	which got him sacked in 1996 as a House of Commons,
1:13.2	Clark, is being republished this April as a classic. Then in September, Phillips bringing out
	...

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