London Review Bookshop Podcast

In ‘a wonderful book about looking and learning’ (Gavin Francis) retired GP Iona Heath relates the importance that John Berger’s work and friendship had on her working life as a doctor in a deprived London borough. Five decades of engagement with Berger’s work and twenty years of friendship with the man himself made her, she is convinced, a better doctor. Heath was in conversation about Berger’s legacy, for medicine and beyond, with film director and screenwriter Sally Potter, who wrote, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, ‘[John Berger] reminds us how to think about Charlie Chaplin, how to listen to songs, how to rage about prisons, how to remember that everything matters.’

Taking us from the awkwardness of middle school to the transcendence of a sex club, SLUTS: Anthology (Cipher Press) presents a diverse collection of writing – fiction and non-fiction, pro and con, philosophical and compulsive – exploring the eternally controversial word. Whether an insult or badge of honour, an identity or a state of mind, SLUTS engages some of the hottest minds of the moment to riff on the subject, exploring the nature of desire and its cultural consequences.The anthology’s editor, Michelle Tea (Black Wave, Against Memoir), and contributor Jeremy Atherton Lin (Gay Bar) read from and discussed the project.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

If Only – first published in Norway in 2001, and now brought into English by Charlotte Barslund – is viewed in Norway as Vigdis Hjorth’s masterpiece, a story of the devastation wreaked on one woman’s life by an ill-advised affair. Hjorth (whose other novels in English include Is Mother Dead?, Will and Testament and Long Live the Post Horn!) is in conversation about the novel with Lauren Oyler, whose own debut novel, Fake Accounts, was published in 2021, and whose essay collection No Judgement came out earlier this year.

In Mother State (Allen Lane), Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. ‘Mother’ ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act. Charman discusses her book with Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.Find more events at the Bookhsop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

Best known for her novels – most recently, 2021’s The Fell – now Sarah Moss has turned her hand to life-writing. My Good Bright Wolf unflinchingly details her experience of girlhood and anorexia in prose described by Jan Carson as ‘part memoir, part confessional, part dark and feverish fairytale’. Moss was in conversation with Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace.

Why be a slug? Slugs: A Manifesto (Makina Books) explores a creature that survives by being disgusting. Weaving together manifesto, memoir and poetic language, artist Abi Palmer considers the politics of space, iridescent queerness, and shapeshifting viscous ‘slug time’. In the face of a potential apocalypse, Slugs: A Manifesto envisions a future where humanity becomes just a little more sluglike.Palmer was joined in conversation with Zarina Muhammad of The White Pube, co-author of the forthcoming Poor Artists (Particular Books).Find more events at the Bookhsop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

In her first novel Hagstone (Fourth Estate), Sinéad Gleeson – who has, in the words of Anne Enright, ‘changed the Irish literary landscape through her advocacy for the female voice’ – explores the darker side of human nature and the mysteries of faith and the natural world in the setting of a remote island housing a commune of women seeking refuge from the modern world.She was joined in discussion by Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet Hagstone: https://lrb.me/hagstonepod

In Catherine Lacey’s dystopian thriller, recently published in paperback by Granta, CM Lucca, widow of a recently deceased avant-garde artist, sets out to write a biography of the woman she idolised. Her quest leads her, through a maze of pseudonyms, half-truths and outright fabrications, on a journey into the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that seceded from the Union after the Second World War. Lacey, author of three previous novels and one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young American Novelists’, was joined in conversation about her work by Jen Calleja, translator, co-founder of micro-press Praspar and author of Vehicle (Prototype).Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

Palestinian writer and journalist Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin (Footnote Press) has been hailed as ‘already a masterpiece’ (Slavoj Žižek), ‘a filthy, elegant book’ (Raven Leilani) and ‘bonkers’ (Elif Batuman). A young Palestinian woman, wealthy but stateless and with no access to her wealth, finds her life and sense of self unravelling as she teaches underprivileged children at a New York middle school, gets involved in a money-making scheme selling Birkin bags and becomes unhealthily obsessed with health and cleanliness.Zaher read from her novel, and was joined for discussion by poet and novelist Sheena Patel (I'm a Fan).Get the book: https://lrb.me/thecoinpodFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/thecoinpod