London Review Bookshop Podcast

Drawing on her own experience restoring a walled garden in Suffolk, and moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. She was joined in conversation with writer, critic and frequent LRB contributor Jon Day.Get The Garden Against Time: https://lrb.me/gardenlaingFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

At a Bethesda Baptist chapel two worshippers, separated in age by three decades, are drawn together by common interests, driven apart by divergent loves, before being reunited by the mysteries surrounding their small town. Francis Spufford describes Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape) as ‘a book in which everything is kindled into light by Sarah Perry’s rapt, luminous attention: friendship, betrayal, faith, astronomy, the drizzle on the streets of Essex and the heavens above them.’ Sarah Perry, author of Essex Girls, Melmoth and The Essex Serpent, read from the novel and talked about it with nature writer and novelist Helen Macdonald.

Held is Anne Michaels’ long-awaited new novel – following on from the 1996 classic Fugitive Pieces and 2009’s The Winter Vault – exploring, in the words of Margaret Atwood, ‘war and its damages, passed through generations over a century’.Michaels shared an extended reading from Held with actor Stephen Dillane, who played Jakob Beer in the 2007 film adaptation of Fugitive Pieces, and was joined in conversation by the evening's host, Gareth Evans.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet the book: https://lrb.me/heldpod

Choirboy, drag act, grandson, mentor, poet, lover, activist, performer: Dean Atta has played many roles in his life. In his explosive, candid and courageous memoir Person Unlimited (Canongate) he describes a life lived in defiance of categories. Benjamin Zephaniah wrote of Atta’s work as being ‘As honest as truth itself. He follows no trend; he seeks no favours . . . Beyond black, beyond white, beyond straight, beyond gay, so I say. Love your eyes over these words of truth. You will be uplifted’. Dean Atta reads from his work and talks about it with writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen.

In The Future of Songwriting, lead singer with Throwing Muses, solo artist and songwriter Kristin Hersh reflects on the status and future of her chosen genre over a long, hot Christmas in Australia. In a series of conversations, encounters and philosophical dialogues Hersh delivers a fierce, funny and existential meditation on the art of the song - and its future. She was joined at the Bookshop by writer and critic Jennifer Hodgson.Get the book: https://lrb.me/kristinhershpodFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

In her debut novel Amma (Weatherglass), a multi-generational saga set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and London, Saraid de Silva explores memory, trauma and displacement. She was in conversation with Nina Mingya Powles, author of Tiny Moons and Small Bodies of Water.

When Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work was published shortly before the author’s death in 1995, Marina Warner wrote in the LRB: ‘This small book contains multitudes. It fits to the hand like one of those knobbed hoops that do concise duty for the rosary, each knob giving the mind pause to open up to vistas of meditation on mysteries and passion.’To mark the publication of a new edition (Penguin Modern Classics) with an introduction by Madeleine Pulman-Jones, we host a discussion of Rose’s ‘masterpiece of the autobiographer’s art’ (Edward Said) and its legacy, featuring LRB contributing editor James Butler, Rebekah Howes of the University of Winchester and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

1917: Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block.1930: Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman's cottage for sale on the Dorset coast.1941: Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers' retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming 'a writer again'.Harriet Baker describes in Rural Hours (Allen Lane) how three very different writers, more often associated with city living, found solace and inspiration in the English countryside. She was in conversation with Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse and translator of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables.