An interview with Peter Carey

To celebrate the inclusion of Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America on the 2010 Booker Prize long-list, Bookhugger is proud to present an interview with the author.

Philippa Gregory on The Red Queen

To celebrate today’s publication of The Red Queen, Philippa Gregory talks about the book’s central character, Margaret Beaufort, the Mother of the Tudors.

Meet the author of City of Sin, Catharine Arnold

The BBC’s Meet the Author talks to Catharine Arnold about her latest book, City of Sin.

Filmed in four different locations around the capital, including the Boneyward in Southwark, by the Globe theatre, in Covent garden, and on the Embankment by Waterloo Bridge – all locations covered in the book and connected to the history of prostitution in London.

Jo Shapcott on her new collection Of Mutability

The award-winning author of Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep, which were gathered together in a selected poems, Her Book, discusses her new collection.

Graham Robb on Parisians

No-one knows a city like the people who live there – so who better to relate the history of Paris than its inhabitants through the ages? Taking us from 1750 to the new millennium, Parisians introduces us to some of those inhabitants: we meet spies, soldiers, scientists and alchemists; police commissioners, photographers and philosophers; adulterers, murderers, prisoners and prostitutes.

Helen Rappaport: Lenin in Exile

Conspirator is the compelling story of Lenin’s exile: the years in which he and his political collaborators plotted a revolution that would change 20th century history. Historian and Russianist Helen Rappaport talks to George Miller

Hit the road with Joe Moran

We use roads every day, yet we have no idea of why our journeys are the way they are – of how roads are built, signposted, mapped or numbered. In unravelling this history, cultural historian Joe Moran throws a whole new light onto our history and our daily lives. Here he talks to George Miller.

Alberto Manguel: A Reader on Reading

George Miller talks to Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called ‘the Casanova of reading’. In his In a major new collection of his essays, argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species.

Ian Davidson on Voltaire

We think of Voltaire as the epitome of the Enlightenment; in his own time he was also the most famous and controversial figure in Europe. Ian Davidson’s new biography celebrates his extraordinary life through the thousands of his letters to have survived. Here, he discusses it with George Miller.

Zoya Phan on Little Daughter – A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West

Zoya Phan is a 28-year-old ethnic Karen refugee from Burma. As a teenager she was forced to flee her country after her village was attacked by the Burmese Army. She now lives in London and works for the human rights organization Burma Campaign UK. Listen to her talk about her life in this podcast.

Paul Collier on The Plundered Planet

Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion had a profound impact on our thinking about global poverty. Now, with The Plundered Planet, he has set himself an even more ambitious goal: to reconcile the immediate needs of the world’s burgeoning population with a sustainable environmental future.

Maria McCann talks about The Wildling

In her second novel Maria McCann returns to 17th-century England, where life is struggling to return to normal after the horrific tumult of the Civil War. Here, she talks to George Miller about the book.

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Nick Kent on Apathy for the Devil

Legendary NME rock journalist Nick Kent discusses his memoir of the 70s, Apathy for the Devil, which features his encounters with the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Chrissy Hynde, David Bowie and the Sex Pistols.

Listen to James Shapiro talk about Contested Will

In his new book Contested Will James Shapiro investigates one of literature’s great mysteries – did Shakespeare actually write what we think he wrote? George Miller talked to him about this controversial topic.

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Mick Jackson answers questions about The Widow’s Tale

In an interview conducted for the Norwich Summer Reads campaign, Mick Jackson talks about his latest novel, his writing approach and the art of fiction.

Muriel Barbery talks about The Gourmet

Muriel Barbery is the best-selling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and The Gourmet. In this interview, the media-shy Frenchwoman reveals to Jennifer Whitehead the joy she took in writing The Gourmet; the shadow Marcel Proust casts over French literature; and why she won’t tell us about her most memorable meal.

Siberian education, according to Nicolai Lilin

Nicolai Lilin was born in 1981 and grew up in the small republic of Transnistria which declared its independence from Moldova in 1990 but has never been recognised. In this video, Lilin tells us more about his experiences in Siberian Education, his memoir of growing up in a society of ‘honest criminals’.

An interview with Sue Armstrong, author of A Matter of Life and Death

Sue Armstrong is a science writer and broadcaster living in Edinburgh, who has undertaken a variety of assignments writing reports for the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS. Here she talks about her book exploring the vital work of pathologists, which really is A Matter of Life and Death.

Jenny Uglow talks to George Miller about A Gambling Man

Acclaimed biographer Jenny Uglow’s previous subjects have included Thomas Bewick and Elizabeth Gaskell. In A Gambling Man she takes on risk-taking Charles II and the regime changing Restoration – inspired, as she explains, by recent events.

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Hector and the Search for Happiness video interview

Hector and the Search for Happiness, which has sold well over 2 million copies worldwide, has just been published in English. George Miller met the author, Francois Lelord, recently to find out more about this modern-day fable. This short video is the result.

Joanna Kavenna: The Birth of Love

Joanna Kavenna’s first novel Inglorious won the Orange Broadband New Writers Award. Her forthcoming new book The Birth of Love is quite different but equally brilliant – interwoven stories exploring motherhood, often quite bleak and dystopian, featuring four characters (including real Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, aka the ‘saviour of mothers’) across multiple time zones.

Stardust reading group guide

This reading group guide for Stardust includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Joseph Kanon. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.