Faber and Faber's monthly podcast, featuring authors in conversation with interviewer George Miller. Available for download, and completely free.

The Faber Books Podcast: Authors in Their Own Words

Award-winning theatre director Michael Blakemore arrived in the UK from Australia in 1950. Following 15 years as an actor he moved into directing, scoring his first major hit with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. Many successes have followed: productions of classics, new plays from the likes of Hare and Mamet, and a successful partnership with Michael Frayn. His new book Stage Blood describes Blakemore's five years at the National Theatre in the 1970s: more successes alongside years of turbulence, as Olivier's time as Artistic Director came to an end to be replaced by the controversial Peter Hall. An era of big personalities and questions asked around the need for subsidised theatre - questions which remain relevant today.

Michael Blakemore: Stage Blood

Graham Farmelo first appeared on the Faber Podcast in 2009 to tell us about his book on physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, which went on to earn the author the Costa Biography Award. He’s back to discuss his new book, Churchill’s Bomb, a fascinating and pacy story of how Britain became a nuclear power, seen through the lens of Winston Churchill’s career. Churchill, as we learn, always had an interest in science. He was a devoted reader of H. G. Wells, and Churchill himself pondered the nuclear question in his writing. In 1937 he contemplated the destructive potential that science’s mastery of nature held out – at a time when many scientists still doubted a nuclear bomb was achievable – and asked, ‘Are we fit for it?’ The book is also a story of how the centre of nuclear physics shifted from Britain to the USA, and the coming into being of post-war geopolitics in which nuclear capability would loom so large. (www.faber.co.uk/churchillsbomb)

Graham Farmelo: Churchill's Bomb

Distinguished writer, essayist and anthologist Ronald Blythe is best-known for his classic portrayal of 1960s Suffolk village life, Akenfield. This year sees publication of a new memoir, The Time by the Sea, in which he remembers life in the mid-1950s and the early years of the Aldeburgh Festival, with a social scene dominated by the likes of Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Imogen Holst, John and Christine Nash and many other artists, writers and musicians. Blythe recounts also his discoveries - in the arts, botany, and the history and geography of his native county. It's a wonderfully nostalgic interview recalling a bygone era, recorded in the seclusion of Blythe's remote home on the Essex/Suffolk border.

Ronald Blythe: The Time by the Sea

Set in 18th-century London, Maria McCann’s third novel Ace, King, Knave has everything you’d want in a work of historical fiction, and more. Everything from gin and gambling, to the harsh realities of Georgian life, including the burden of disease (which cared little for class or status), the levels of extreme poverty and the plight of women. We first spoke to Maria on the Faber Podcast in 2010 when she published The Wilding. Her new novel, Ace, King, Knave, finds her making a radical move for a historical novelist - switching centuries - and that is one of many topics up for discussion here.

Maria McCann: Ace, King, Knave

The UK has seen its wettest January for more than a century,  whilst California is suffering its worst drought for the same amount of time. And whilst the band of climate change deniers seems only to grow, the general consensus is that global warming is causing irreversible damage to all parts of the globe. In 'Turned Out Nice', Marek Kohn presents a stark and authoritative vision of the future. He looks specifically at the UK but in the context of the wider world, and how our descendants' relationship to neighbouring countries might be impacted. What might the UK look like if we all carry on in the same way?

Marek Kohn: Turned Out Nice

Akhil Sharma was born in New Delhi and emigrated to the US in the late 1970s. Having initially pursued a career in investment banking he came to prominence as a writer in 2001 with his debut novel, An Obedient Father, which won the Hemingway/PEN Award. And in 2007 he was named as one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. So expectations for what Akhil would do next have been high for some time. Family Life, mirroring events in Akhil's own life - his brother suffered a severe head injury and was left brain-damaged - has been a dozen years in the writing, has undergone many drafts and considerable pruning. But it's now with us and being rapturously received on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Akhil Sharma: Family Life

Roderick Bailey was able to draw on long-classified documents for his dazzling recreation of the cloak-and-dagger war fought by British secret agents in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) against Mussolini's Fascist Italy during the Second World War, which climaxed in one of the most extraordinary episodes of the whole conflict. Now stationed as a historian at the University of Oxford, Bailey was commissioned by the Cabinet Office to pen the official history of the war waged by the SOE. His account is incredibly pacy and readable, telling the story from both sides and recounting exploits so daring and implausible (for example, a little-known plot to assassinate Il Duce in 1942) that - if this were fiction - they would be dismissed as implausible. Here is the author speaking to the Faber Podcast.

Roderick Bailey: Target: Italy

Leading international economist Gerard Lyons spent nearly thirty years working in the City and is now Chief Economic Advisor to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. In 2010 and 2011 Bloomberg ranked him the number one global forecaster out of 400 leading economists, so his views on where we are heading economically are worth listening to. In his new book The Consolations of Economics he lays out his roadmap for an optimistic future. Hear what he has to say in a Faber Podcast recorded at City Hall, with the skyscrapers of the City the ideal backdrop.

Gerard Lyons: The Consolations of Economics

John Lanchester's previous book on money and banking - the bestselling 'Whoops!' - was described by Will Self as 'the routemap to the crazed world of contemporary finance we've all been waiting for'. If 'Whoops!' was the routemap, then his new book, 'How to Speak Money' is the phrasebook. It shows you it's possible to learn to speak the language of money - possible, desirable and perhaps even necessary if we're to avoid feelings of complete helplessness and bafflement when confronted with the big financial forces that shape our lives.

John Lanchester: How to Speak Money

Welcome to the first of three podcasts from Faber this Autumn focusing on major new works of history. In the next two months we'll hear from Helen Castor and Jenny Uglow but today we're in conversation with Dan Jones, who completes a three-volume study of medieval Britain with The Hollow Crown, in which he charts the turbulent downfall of the Plantagenets and the rise of the Tudors. As Dan says himself, it's a story that's 'big, bloody and thrilling'.

Dan Jones: The Hollow Crown

Our latest Faber Podcast is about a building – The Old Vic theatre on London’s South Bank, and the subject of a new book by journalist and writer Terry Coleman, whose many previous books include the authorised life of Laurence Olivier. Dating back almost two centuries the Old Vic is an institution that holds a place in national cultural life with few rivals – all the more surprising when you bear in mind it’s not a state-funded enterprise. The Old Vic has had to forge its own identity over the years, and the story Terry tells is full of highs and lows, triumphs and disasters, characters much larger than life – on and off-stage. ‘Theatre thrives on legends,’ he writes, and that is abundantly so in the case of the Old Vic.

Terry Coleman: The Old Vic

This is the story of Joan of Arc as you have never heard it before, told by Helen Castor, author of the acclaimed bestseller and BBC documentary series She-Wolves. Instead of the icon, she gives us a living, breathing young woman; a roaring girl fighting the English, and taking sides in a bloody civil war that was tearing fifteenth-century France apart. In this podcast interview she discusses how she came to write the book, and her attempt to retell the story stripped of the myths and legends.

In Helen Castor's book she gives us a portrait of a 19-year-old peasant who hears voices from God; a teenager transformed into a warrior leading an army to victory, in an age that believed women should not fight. And it is also the story behind the myth we all know, a myth which began to take hold at her trial: that of the Maid of Orleans, the saviour of France, a young woman burned at the stake as a heretic, a woman who five hundred years later would be declared a saint.

Joan and her world are brought vividly to life in Helen Castor's refreshing new take on the medieval world. 

Helen Castor: Joan of Arc

In this edition of the Faber Podcast we talk to Australian novelist and long-time New York resident Peter Carey. His new book Amnesia is the story of a young female hacker - Gaby - whose Angel Worm virus creates havoc in the Australian prison system, and consequently also in the US, making her Public Enemy Number One. This 30-minute interview covers everything from US/Australian relations (especially post-1975 and America's role in the removal of the Gough Whitlam government), new forms of protest, activism and hacking, and those rumours that Carey was asked to ghost-write the Julian Assange story.

Peter Carey: Amnesia

Neil McKenna's rollicking and extremely colourful 'Fanny and Stella' is an account of the lives and loves of two effeminate cross-dressing young men whom Victorian society found every bit as shocking as Oscar Wilde (the subject of the author's previous award-winning biography). Like Wilde, Fanny and Stella found themselves on trial for the way they lived and, McKenna argues, like Wilde's trial a quarter of a century later, the trial of Fanny and Stella was a landmark in terms of attitudes to gender, sexuality and identity.

Neil McKenna: Fanny and Stella

Like Nadeem Aslam's previous novel The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man's Garden is set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. But whereas its predecessor focused on foreign characters who came to Afghanistan from other nations, in the new book Aslam explores how a group of Pakistani characters experience the onset of the war on terror. The conflict is never far away in one of the most rapturously received novels so far this year.

Nadeem Aslam: The Blind Man's Garden

The gun in the title of Emma Brockes' extraordinary memoir belonged to her mother Paula, who left South Africa as a young woman in the 1960s to build a new life for herself in England, away from the trauma of her earlier years. 'One day I will tell you the story of my life', she promised her ten-year-old daughter, 'and you will be amazed'. She didn't reveal details during her lifetime, but something piqued her journalist daughter's curiosity. Tracking down relatives on a different continent, some more reticent than others, Emma Brockes unravels an astonishing story of murder, molestation and abuse. Yet the book is far from misery memoir, packed as it is with quirky stories and tales of amazing resilience. 

Emma Brockes: She Left Me the Gun

Louise Doughty was a guest on the Faber Podcast in 2010, when she discussed Whatever You Love. Her new novel, Apple Tree Yard, shares with its predecessor an interest in the working out of vengeance, but in an entirely different context. Yvonne Carmichael is a loyal wife, a good mother, and a successful geneticist but one poor decision - the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong man - sees her life spiral out of control, climaxing in a murder trial at the Old Bailey. It's an intriguing narrative and here Louise Doughty tells us more, talking us through not just the novel but the many ideas contained within, including prejudice and sexual politics, the criminal justice system, and even the erotic potential of the Houses of Parliament.

Louise Doughty: Apple Tree Yard

Marcel Theroux's new novel Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, translation, consciousness, metamorphosis, technology, necromancy, resurrection, immortality, not to mention Frankenstein, Ray Kurzweil and some of Communist Russia's most prominent thinkers. The book fizzes with ideas, but ultimately leaves you pondering just what it is to be human. Here is Marcel Theroux in conversation with Faber Podcast host George Miller.

Marcel Theroux: Strange Bodies

Set in a world that Barbara Kingsolver knows well - rural Tennessee - Flight Behaviour follows events in the life of Dellarobia Turnbow, a woman in her late twenties who married the wrong man too young, and who gave up her own plans on becoming pregnant aged 17. One day, on the way to her first tryst with a lover, she has an encounter which at first she can't explain - millions of monarch butterflies that have been thrown off course by the effects of climate change, setting the forest aglow like a living sea of fire. The changes that the butterflies bring to Dellarobia's life - her awakening to what is at stake and how she can channel her own flight behaviour - are at the core of this beautifully written novel, which is informed of course by Kingsolver's own knowledge and experience as a biologist and conservationist.

Barbara Kingsolver: Flight Behaviour

In Times of Fading Light is Eugen Ruge's 2011 German Book Prize-winning debut novel. A multi-generational story spanning well over half a century (and drawing to a certain extent on Ruge's own family history), it charts the impact of wider historical events on the lives of the Umlitzer family, who once belonged to the Communist elite but whose socialist utopia has long-since vanished by the time the book opens in 2001. Through four generations Ruge presents different perspectives of life under different political regimes and the restrictions they imposed - we move from Fascism, to Communism and post-Communism, finishing with hyper-Capitalism. We witness characters' lives that still have their fair share of mundane chores, problems and domestic disputes, but which appear extraordinary set against backdrops that are hard now to imagine.

Eugen Ruge: In Times of Fading Light

Faber and Faber is one of the great independent publishing houses in London. We were established in 1929 by Geoffrey Faber and our first editor was T. S. Eliot. We are proud to publish prize-winning fiction and non-fiction, as well as an unrivalled list of modern poets and playwrights. Among our list of writers we have five Booker Prize winners and twelve Nobel Laureates, and we continue to seek out the most exciting and innovative writers at work today. 

The Faber Books Podcast: Authors in Their Own Words

FaberBooks