The Book Club

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by bestselling novelist Hannah Richell to discuss her new memoir, An Ocean and a Day.

When Hannah’s husband died in a surfing accident, her life in Australia was shattered. Suddenly, she was a single mother to two young children, navigating a grief she could never have imagined. Her memoir traces that journey from the moment of the accident, but, more uniquely, looks beyond those first years of loss – to what grief looks like with the benefit of time, distance and reflection.

Sam and Hannah discuss the shame and embarrassment that can accompany grief, the physical effects of loss, how her experience has shaped her fiction, and what makes memoirs so powerful - to both writer and reader.
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In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by The Times columnist James Marriott, whose new book is The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-literate Society.
Are we witnessing the end of the reading age? James explains why literacy has shaped not just our culture but the way we think – and why its decline could have profound consequences for politics, democracy and public life. They discuss how television, TikTok and short-form video have transformed our attention spans, whether AI will further erode the status of writing, and why the readers of the future may become a new cognitive elite.
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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author of a number of fantastic books, including The Cauldron, which released this week. Simon and I talk about the making of the modern middle east, and how we forget some of the most fundamental groups who shaped this part of the world into the region that we know of today.
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This week marks the 160th anniversary of Beatrix Potter’s birth. In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Penny Bradshaw, author of An A–Z of Beatrix Potter, and the historian and biographer Kathryn Hughes, whose books include Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World, George Eliot and The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton.
We plunge into the Potterverse. Does Potter get her due as a literary writer? How animal are her animals? And what went wrong for Ginger and Pickles?
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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Tim Whitmarsh, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and author of Rome’s Age of Revolution: Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity. He tells me why, contrary to what we may have learnt at Sunday school, early Christianity flourished not despite the Roman empire, but because of it.
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