Niall Williams’ Time of the Child might just be the big ‘feel-good book of the year’—but there’s more to it than that. This is a beautifully written Irish story, full of ordinary lives described in painfully funny detail. Also, Scottish writer Ali Smith and her too-real-to-be-allegorical Gliff; and in Alan Moore's The Great When, we're presented with a hallucinatory vision of an alternative London, anchored in post-World War ll realism.

BOOKS

Ali Smith, Gliff, Hamish Hamilton

Alan Moore, The Great When, Bloomsbury

Niall Williams, Time of the Child, Bloomsbury

GUESTS

Garth Nix, sci-fi and fantasy writer whose books include the Old Kingdom series, Angel Mage , and  The Left-Handed Booksellers of London; his latest is a middle-grade novel, We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord

Chris Hammer, crime writer whose books include Scrublands, Silver, and The Tilt. His latest, featuring his characters Nell Buchanan and Ivan Lucic is The Valley 

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONEDKazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me GoAldous Huxley, Brave New WorldClaire Keegan, Small Things Like TheseFintan O'Toole, We Don't Know OurselvesLarry McMurtry, Lonesome DoveChris Whittaker, We Begin at the EndC.S. Robertson, The Trials of Marjorie Crowe

CREDITS

• Presenter: Kate Evans, Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans, Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Craig Tilmouth, Ann-Marie Debettencor
• Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown