The Booking Club

Megan Nolan is an Irish author and journalist. She gained critical prominence after releasing her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, which received a Betty Trask Award in 2022. Her second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, was shortlisted for a number of awards.Nolan also writes essays, fiction and reviews, with a new collection of essays due as of spring 2026. She met with Jack Aldane to discuss the challenges of writing, reading and living intentionally in the age of the smartphone. She also wrote on the subject for The Observer in a feature entitled The Lost Art of Paying Attention earlier this year.Megan met Jack at Le Paddock in her neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York.Follow and subscribe to The Booking Club:YouTube: @bookingclubpodTwitter/X: @bookingclubpodBlue Sky: @bookingclubpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @bookingclubpodTikTok: @bookingclubpod

Ross Barkan is a born and raised New Yorker, journalist and author of four novels. He is the co-founder of The Metropolitan Review, New York's youngest books and culture magazine. His latest work of fiction, Colossus, is summarised as follows:"A stark and unsettling portrait of success, in the vein of Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, that revives the long-established intersection between ambition and corruption in the pursuit of the American dream.Teddy Starr has it all. A beloved pastor in a small Midwestern town, a devoted husband and father of three, and a rising real estate magnate, he has built a life that gleams with virtue and success. Self-made in every sense, Teddy is a man of conviction, or at least it seems. But behind the pulpit and the polished smile lies a fractured past, and when a figure from that buried life reemerges, the once-sturdy walls of his world begin to fall.As scandal and ambition collide, Colossus becomes the story of American hunger for reinvention and the blatant self-interest beneath its surface. Written with the moral gravity of Robert Penn Warren and the psychological insight of Philip Roth, Ross Barkan offers a timely update on the examination of the American identity in an age of performance and decay." Ross meets Jack at Edwards in downtown ManhattanFollow and subscribe to The Booking Club:YouTube: @bookingclubpodTwitter/X: @bookingclubpodBlue Sky: @bookingclubpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @bookingclubpodTikTok: @bookingclubpod

The eagerly anticipated final volume of Jay McInerney's stunningly accomplished and profoundly affecting fictional tetralogy: Brightness Falls, The Good Life, Bright Precious Days, and now See You on the Other SideIt's early 2020 in New York, and the looming threat of a global pandemic begins to unsettle the gilded lives of Manhattan's literary and social elite. Now in their sixties, Russell and Corrine Calloway are navigating a new chapter: downsizing from their Harlem brownstone to a penthouse in the Village, grieving the death of Corrine's mother, and all the while facing the encroaching anxieties of aging, memory, and cultural obsolescence.Their daughter, Storey, prepares to launch her dream restaurant in Brooklyn just as fear begins to empty dining rooms and the city starts to shut down. Meanwhile, as the world tilts towards crisis, Russell is pulled between domestic stability and the temptation of an affair with a younger writer – an emotional turmoil which reignites complicated questions about fidelity and the alternate paths their lives might have taken.Told with McInerney's signature wit and elegiac prose, See You on the Other Side is a dazzling finale to the bestselling Calloway series, capturing the disorientation of a couple forced to confront their own mortality amidst shifting cultural tides and the slow unravelling of the world they once knew.Jay meets Jack at Parcelle, in Chinatown, on the Lower East-Side of ManhattanFollow and subscribe to The Booking Club:YouTube: @bookingclubpodTwitter/X: @bookingclubpodBlue Sky: @bookingclubpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @bookingclubpodTikTok: @bookingclubpod

To command narrative is to control a sometimes frightening power. What is it that turbocharges some tales, and how is it possible to harness that potency?John Yorke’s groundbreaking bestseller, Into the Woods, revolutionised our understanding of story structure. This new book delves deeper into how to put that structure to work in the world. Trip to the Moon takes us on a journey not just through drama and fiction but through politics, religion and non-western narrative. Through these terrains, Yorke seeks out the role of story in all our lives, examining how to utilise its lessons to create life-changing tales – and, in a world aflame with conspiracy theories, to guard ourselves against their darker purpose too.Revealing the artful symmetry and underlying principles that connect Summer beach reads to Classical Chinese poetry, superhero flicks to Russian arthouse, and classical rhetoric to state propaganda, Yorke makes dazzling connections that show how stories have the power to transfigure the chaos of our existence into a new equilibrium, and make the world anew.John and Jack meet at The Fig and Walnut in Bloomsbury.Follow and subscribe to The Booking Club:YouTube: @bookingclubpodTwitter/X: @bookingclubpodBlue Sky: @bookingclubpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @bookingclubpodTikTok: @bookingclubpod

Joel Foster is a hapless twenty-something. His girlfriend, Beth Lewis, would likely have been a hapless twenty-something, too, had she not been obliterated by a very large cement truck.Some time after Beth’s tragic death, Joel is still trying to juggle grief with the world of modern dating. And while he still feels like a widower, he has to find a new love before three years is up.The catch? Just as Joel thinks he’s finally falling for someone, he starts getting haunted by Beth. It’s not a ghost story, it’s a love story. With ghosts.Nearly Departed is novelist Lucas Oakeley's first work of fiction. When not writing novels, Lucas is a food journalist and book influencer tirelessly recommending books for boys and advocating for men in general to choose reading over watching YouTube Shorts, flirting with ChatGPT or disappearing down another Reddit hole.Starting the new year over a gorgeous Ethiopian plate, he and Jack discuss men, love and modern book culture.Lucas and Jack meet at Zeret Kitchen in Camberwell, South London.Follow and subscribe to The Booking Club:YouTube: @bookingclubpodTwitter/X: @bookingclubpodBlue Sky: @bookingclubpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @bookingclubpodTikTok: @bookingclubpod

Who Will Remain by Kasim Ali is a powerful new novel following a young man as he weighs up the life of safety that his parents want for him and another path on the streets outside his door, from the acclaimed author of Good Intentions.Amir has grown up in Alum Rock, Birmingham, under the care of his sensible older brother, Bilal, and his cousin Saqib, born just a few days before Amir. Alum Rock can be a troubled place, but Amir has managed to keep his head down, worked hard and stayed out of trouble … until now.When Saqib is killed in a gang fight and Bilal announces his engagement, Amir suddenly loses the two men who keep him grounded. Amir’s university grades are collapsing, he’s running out of money, and pressure mounts from every direction. As tensions flare, the friends left around him start to draw Amir into their more dangerous pursuits, and the family ties that have bound him so completely begin to unravel.Amir decides he only has himself to rely on and must take his future into his own hands.This is a blistering story of social expectations and social condemnation, of dead ends and divided loyalties, and of what’s left behind when you have nothing left to lose. (Harper Collins)Kasim meets Jack at Salim's in Turnpike Lane, North London.Follow and subscribe to The Booking Club:YouTube: @bookingclubpodTwitter/X: @bookingclubpodBlue Sky: @bookingclubpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @bookingclubpodTikTok: @bookingclubpod