Books on Podcasts: Aria Aber and 'techno temples'
On the Inklings Book Club podcast, host Jack Edwards interviewed Aria Aber about her 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction and New Adult Book Prize shortlisted debut, Good Girl (Bloomsbury). Edwards described the novel as a "conversation about performance and identity" that takes "place in Berlin in these temples of techno".
In response to a question about the relationship between nightclubs and identity, Aber said: "I think I was interested in the powers we have unharnessed that we are maybe not aware of as young people, especially as young girls. Nila, my protagonist, she’s Afghan and really conflicted about her identity, she conceals it from other people... and she masquerades as Greek and sometimes as other nationalities. At the same time, she has youth and she has this curiosity and a kind of wildness that she’s exuding on the outside."
George Saunders appeared on the Waterstones podcast to discuss his latest book, Vigil (Bloomsbury), which takes place at the bedside of dying oil magnate KJ Wood and follows the ghost in charge of shepherding him to the afterlife. When asked whether he intended to explore climate change in the novel, Saunders said: "[I] put it on the table as an item of interest to see if the book forms around it, because when you think about it there’s not a novel to write about climate change, it’s kind of like writing a novel about gravity. It’s true. It’s scientifically verifiable... Sometimes just put it on the table and see if the book wants it in there."
John Lanchester joined host James Crawford on the Take Four Books podcast to discuss his latest novel, Look What You Made Me Do (Faber), a black comedy where he "takes his writerly scalpel to intergenerational conflict". The novel is told from the perspective of two women, Phoebe and Kate, who are both introduced by Lanchester at the beginning on the interview.
"Kate is in her mid-50s and married to a successful architect called Jack and lives this very comfortable, settled, upper-middle-class London life... She is not quite who you think she is when you first meet her. Phoebe is a young screenwriter.
"When we first meet her, she is on the cusp of having her first show, that she conceived of and wrote herself and is her first big hit. Where Kate is someone who is outwardly nice, Phoebe is someone whose way of dealing with the world is much spikier and more abrasive."
In an interview with Lanchester, The Bookseller’s Madeleine Feeny described the novel as a "stylish and entertaining revenge comedy".
