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Welcome to The Bookseller Podcast

The monthly podcast for book lovers

Introducing The Bookseller's monthly podcast, hosted by acclaimed author Cathy Rentzenbrink. From interviews with award winning authors to the latest reviews and book recommendations, our unique place at the heart of publishing means The Bookseller Podcast has something for every book lover.

Each month, we will deliver a variety of bookish delights for you to consume – wherever the mood takes you. Whether you’re commuting, listening at work, or relaxing at home, take The Bookseller Podcast with you.

Listen to Episode #5

Full Episode - April 2019

Exclusive interview with Damian Barr

New titles for April

Nibbies Shortlist

Book Doctors Henry Layte from The Book Hive and Carrie Morris from Booka

Extract from “The Confessions of Frannie Langton” written and read by Sara Collins

The best book/author events coming up this month in the UK from BookGig

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Interview with Damian Barr - April 2019

An exclusive interview with author and journalist, Damian Barr about his first novel “You Will be Safe Here”, following on from his hugely successful memoir, “Maggie and Me”.

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THE BOOK DOCTORS - April 2019

Hear what two of the British Isles’ best indie bookshops recommend for readers up and down the country. This episode it’s Henry Layte from The Book Hive in Norwich and Carrie Morris from Booka in Oswestry.

Want some advice for your next read in future episodes? Ask your questions in our simple form below!

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Previous Episodes

Missed last month's episode? Catch up on previous episodes of The Bookseller Podcast here.

Catch up here

Hear from the Book Doctors

Get advice from the bookselling experts! Ask The Book Doctors their recommendations for your next read by filling in this simple form.

ASK HERE

books featured in episode four

  • You Will Be Safe Here

    by Damian Barr


    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction & Sagas
    Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
    Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
    Publication date: 4 Apr 2019
    ISBN: 9781408886083

    The brilliant debut novel from the award-winning author of Maggie & Me South Africa, 1901, the height of the second Boer War. Sarah van der Watt and her son are taken from their farm by force to Bloemfontein Concentration Camp where, the English promise: they will be safe. Johannesburg, 2010. Sixteen-year-old outsider Willem just wants to be left alone with his books and his dog. Worried he's not turning out right, his ma and her boyfriend send him to New Dawn Safari Training Camp. Here they `make men out of boys'.

  • Maggie & Me

    by Damian Barr

     

    Category: Biography & Memoirs, Non-fiction, Current Affairs, History
    Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
    Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
    Publication date: 27 Mar 2014
    ISBN: 9781408838099

    Maggie & Me is a touching and darkly witty memoir about surviving Thatcher's Britain; a story of growing up gay in a straight world and coming out the other side in spite of, and maybe because of, the iron lady.

  • The Confessions of Frannie Langton

    by Sara Collins

     

    Category: Historical Fiction & Sagas, Fiction, Romance, Crime & Mystery Fiction
    Imprint: Viking
    Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
    Publication date: 4 Apr 2019
    ISBN: 9780241349199

    They say I must be put to death for what happened to Madame, and they want me to confess. But how can I confess what I don't believe I've done?' 1826, and all of London is in a frenzy. Crowds gather at the gates of the Old Bailey to watch as Frannie Langton, maid to Mr and Mrs Benham, goes on trial for their murder. The testimonies against her are damning - slave, whore, seductress. And they may be the truth. But they are not the whole truth. For the first time Frannie must tell her story.

     

  • Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

    by Neil Ansell

    Category: Biography & Memoirs, Non-Fiction
    Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
    Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
    Publication date: 2 Feb 2012
    ISBN: 9780141049328

    The author spent five years spent alone in a hillside cottage in Wales. He immersed himself in the rugged British landscape, exploring nature's unspoilt wilderness and man's relationship with it. It is the story of what it means to live in a place so remote that you may not see another soul for weeks on end.

     

  • Black, Listed

    by Jeffrey Boakye

    Category: Current Affairs, Non-fiction
    Imprint: Dialogue Books
    Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
    Publication date: 18 Apr 2019
    ISBN: 9780349700557

    A groundbreaking book celebrating the words and phrases that by choice or by circumstance define the Black British experience..

    Read reviews for this book.

  • The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living

    by Mark Boyle

    Category: Biography & Memoirs, Non-fiction
    Imprint: Oneworld Publications
    Publisher: Oneworld Publications
    Publication date: 1 Feb 2011
    ISBN: 9781851687879

    Would it be possible to live for an entire year without money?

     

  • The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology

    by Mark Boyle

    Category: Non-fiction, Current Affairs, Gardening
    Imprint:     Oneworld Publications
    Publisher: Oneworld Publications
    Publication date: 4 Apr 2019
    ISBN: 9781786076007

    It was 11pm when I checked my email for the last time and turned off my phone for what I hoped would be forever.

  • Wild Fire

    by Ann Cleeves

    Category: Crime & Mystery Fiction, Fiction, General & Literary Fiction 
    Imprint:     Macmillan
    Publisher: Pan Macmillan
    Publication date: 6 Sep 2018
    ISBN: 9781447278245

    From award-winning and Sunday Times top five bestseller Ann Cleeves comes the captivating eighth, and final, novel in the Shetland Series featuring DI Jimmy Perez in his most personal case to date.

     

  • The Language of Birds

    by Jill Dawson

    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction 
    Imprint:     Sceptre
    Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton General Division
    Publication date: 4 Apr 2019
    ISBN: 9781473654525

    A hypnotic and thought-provoking novel inspired by the sensational Lord Lucan case, by the Orange Prize-shortlisted author of Fred & Edie.

    View reviews for this book.

  • Watch Me Disappear

    by Jill Dawson

    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction 
    Imprint: Sceptre
    Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton General Division
    Publication date: 11 Jan 2007
    ISBN: 9780340822999

    By the Orange and Whitbread shortlisted author of FRED AND EDIE, a subtle and intriguing novel exploring the line between innocent and warped desire

     

  • Heartburn

    by Nora Ephron & Delia Ephron

    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction, Non-fiction 
    Imprint:     Virago Press Ltd
    Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
    Publication date: 3 May 2018
    ISBN: 9780349010359

    This autobiographical novel by Nora Ephron, Oscar-nominated screenwriter (When Harry Met Sally) and successful director (Sleepless in Seattle), is a bittersweet and very funny book about love and loss. Published as part of a beautifully designed series to mark the 40th anniversary of the Virago Modern Classics.

  • What Dementia Teaches Us About Love Reviews

    by Nicci Gerrard

    Category: Current Affairs, Non-fiction, Family & Health 
    Imprint:     Allen Lane
    Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
    Publication date: 4 Apr 2019
    ISBN: 9780241347454

    'Dementia is all around us, in our families and in our genes; perhaps in our own futures. If it's not you or me, it's someone we love.'

  • The Parisian

    by Isabella Hammad

    Category: Historical Fiction & Sagas, Fiction, General & Literary Fiction, Romance 
    Imprint:     Jonathan Cape Ltd
    Publisher: Vintage Publishing
    Publication date: 11 Apr 2019
    ISBN: 9781911214427

    The Parisian is a sublime reading experience: delicate, restrained, surpassingly intelligent, uncommonly poised and truly beautiful. --Zadie Smith. As the First World War shatters families, destroys friendships and kills lovers, a young Palestinian dreamer sets out to find himself.

  • The Last Pilot

    by Benjamin Johncock

    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction 
    Imprint:     Myriad Editions
    Publisher: Myriad Editions
    Publication date: 9 Jul 2015
    ISBN: 9781908434845

    With echoes of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, The Last Pilot re-ignites the thrill and excitement of the space race through the story of one man's courage in the face of unthinkable loss.

  • Pog

    by Padraig Kenny

    Category: Children's 
    Imprint: Chicken House Ltd
    Publisher: Chicken House Ltd
    Publication date: 4 Apr 2019
    ISBN: 9781911490395

    David and Penny arrive in a strange new home in a forest. Other creatures live here - magical creatures - like Pog. He's one of the First Folk, tasked with protecting the boundary between the worlds. But David is drawn into the forest, lured by a darker entity, who tells him there's a way he can bring his dead mother back ...

  • The Poppy War

    by R.F. Kuang

    Category: Fantasy, Fiction 
    Imprint: HarperCollins
    Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
    Publication date: 23 Apr 2018
    ISBN: 9780008239800

    `The best fantasy debut of 2018' WIRED

     

  • New Year's Day is Black

    by Nicky Loutit

    Category: Biography & Memoirs, Non-fiction, Art & Antiques, Psychology, Current Affairs 
    Imprint:     Propolis
    Publisher: Propolis
    Publication date: 21 Oct 2016
    ISBN: 9780992946029

    The artist Nicky Loutit's remarkable visual memoir, starting with her childhood growing up amongst the cultural elite of London's Bloomsbury set and following her extraordinary journey to the North Norfolk coast today.

     

  • A Monster Calls

    by Patrick Ness, Siobhan Dowd

    Category: Children's 
    Imprint: Walker Books Ltd
    Publisher: Walker Books Ltd
    Publication date: 7 May 2015
    ISBN: 9781406361803

    The bestselling novel about love, loss and hope from the twice Carnegie Medal-winning Patrick Ness, soon to be a major motion picture.

    View reviews for this book.

  • In the Place of Fallen Leaves

    by Tim Pears

    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction 
    Imprint:     Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
    Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
    Publication date: 12 Jan 2017
    ISBN: 9781408884102


    Tim Pears' prize-winning, critically acclaimed debut about a hot summer in a Devon village where time seems to stand still This overwhelmingly hot summer everything seems to be slowing down in the tiny Devon village where Alison lives, as if the sun is pouring hot glue over it. `This idn't nothin',' says Alison's grandmother, recalling a drought when the earth swallowed lambs, and the summer after the war when people got electric shocks off each other. But Alison knows her grandmother's memory is lying: this is far worse.
     

  • The Horseman (The West Country Trilogy)

    by Tim Pears

    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction 
    Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
    Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
    Publication date: 13 Jul 2017
    ISBN: 9781408876848

    From the prize-winning author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves comes a beautiful, hypnotic pastoral novel reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, about an unexpected friendship between two children, set in Devon in 1911.

  • Lanny

    by Max Porter

    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction 
    Imprint: Faber & Faber
    Publisher: Faber & Faber
    Publication date: 7 Mar 2019
    ISBN: 9780571340286

    Everyday lives conjure a tapestry of fabulism and domesticity. This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago.


    View reviews for this book.

  • See What I Have Done

    by Sarah Schmidt

    Category: Crime & Mystery Fiction, Fiction, General & Literary Fiction 
    Imprint:     Tinder Press
    Publisher: Headline Publishing Group
    Publication date: 2 May 2017
    ISBN: 9781472240866

    'Eeerie and compelling' Paula Hawkins - SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE is a haunting retelling of the infamous Lizzie Borden murders from a dazzling debut novelist.

     

  • Spring

    by Ali Smith

    Category: General & Literary Fiction, Fiction, Current Affairs, Non-fiction 
    Imprint: Hamish Hamilton Ltd
    Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
    Publication date: 28 Mar 2019
    ISBN: 9780241207048

     

    From the bestselling author of Autumn and Winter, as well as the Baileys Prize-winning How to be both, comes the next installment in the remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring.

    View reviews of this book.

  • You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol

    by Louisa Young

    Category: Biography & Memoirs, Non-fiction, Family & Health 
    Imprint:     The Borough Press
    Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
    Publication date: 18 Jun 2018
    ISBN: 9780008265175

    `Spectacular. I can't stop thinking about it. Louisa Young is a beautiful, beautiful writer' Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love This brutal, beautiful memoir from award-winning novelist Louisa Young is a heartbreaking portrayal of love, grief and the merciless grip of addiction.

     

     

Production

The Bookseller Podcast is a Heavy Entertainment Production.