Beloved by Toni Morrison was first published in 1987 by Knopf, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, among many other prizes. In 2006, the New York Times declared Beloved the best work of American fiction of the previous twenty-five years. and more recently it came second in the Guardians top 100 novels of all time. This show was recorded in 2019 and our guest is Preti Taneja a novelist, a teacher and an activist. She won the Desmond Elliot Prize for her first book, We That Are Young (2017), and her creative non-fiction work, Aftermath (2022) was based on her own experience of teaching in prison.

In this episode John also enthuses about Lisa Blower’s sparkling story collection It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s published by Myriad Editions and Andy discovers the perfect holiday read in Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands. published by Weidenfeld.

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