Sarah Waters and Walter Murch
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
BEAR by Marian Engel, chosen by novelist Sarah Waters THE TRUE BELIEVER by Eric Hoffer, chosen by film editor Walter Murch THE VISITOR by Maeve Brennan, chosen by presenter Harriett Gilber
Sarah Waters, acclaimed author of Fingersmith and The Night Watch, and Walter Murch, legendary film editor of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient choose the books they love.
Sarah's choice is a cinematic novel set in Northern Canada. Bear by Marian Engel is the unusual tale of a woman's friendship and subsequent sexual relationship with a bear when she travels to a remote island for the summer.
The True Believer is a remarkably prescient examination of mass movements from 1951. Author Eric Hoffer examines political fanaticism throughout the ages. Walter Murch chose it because he says so much of it rings true in today's fractured world.
Harriett's choice is the story of different generations of women in an unhappy home in Ireland. Maeve Brennan's novella The Visitor is a haunting tale of a chilly tight-lipped Dublin home.
Producer: Maggie Ayre, BBC Audio Bristol
Photo: Charlie Hopkinson
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, we'll hear more stories emerging |
| 0:25.2 | 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. |
| 0:34.3 | Then we met. |
| 0:35.2 | The Gift. |
| 0:36.1 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.0 | If you're on the lookout for a new book, you're in the right place, |
| 0:42.3 | because we're going to talk about some of our favourites. |
| 0:44.9 | With me today are the award-winning author Sarah Waters, |
| 0:48.1 | whose novels include Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, the Night Watch, |
| 0:52.0 | and most recently the paying guests. |
| 0:55.4 | Most of Sarah's novels have been adapted for stage, TV and or cinema. Speaking of cinema, with her is the legendary |
| 1:01.6 | film editor, sound mixer, writer and director Walter Merch, who over six decades has worked on |
| 1:06.7 | the plethora of films, including The Godfather One, Two and 3, Apocalypse Now and the English patient in the process earning three Oscars. |
... |
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