It is a great pleasure to welcome back Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return. When Hisham was nineteen years old he came across the Sienese School of Painting for the first time. In the same year his father disappeared and he became transfixed by these paintings. In his new book A Month in Siena he wonderfully evokes the city and the place it has in his life and profoundly considers the connection between its art, his own grief and how art connects with the human condition.

In 1461 a teenage Edward IV won a battle in the Welsh marches to secure the English throne for the house of York. The War of the Roses fractured England for more than thirty years and Thomas Penn brings us these turbulent years of betrayal, backstabbing and paranoia in vivid detail as power shifted between three powerful and talented brothers only to be snatched away by a new usurper, Henry Tudor.

Thomas Penn‘s first book The Winter King was chosen as a Book of the Year by numerous publications and we look forward to hearing more of The Brothers York.

‘Here, the three York brothers spring to ferocious life, and you need strong nerves to meet them. With insight and skill, Penn cuts through the thickets of history to find the heart of these heartless decades.’

Hilary Mantel

We welcome Francesca Wade and Rebecca Mead to discuss our new Daunt publication, the cult classic Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose, which examines five literary Victorian partnerships, from Charles Dickens’ disastrous marriage to Catherine Hogarth to George Eliot’s joyful and unwed union with George Henry Lewes. In an age when divorce was scandalous, the subjects of Rose’s book were forced to find inventive and surprising ways to co-exist and she brilliantly considers how desire, fantasy and power played out in these relationships.

Francesca Wade’s new book Square Haunting is a spell-binding group biography of five Bloomsbury women who pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship and social norms between the wars while Rebecca Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch is an engaging meditation of the way great novelists and their characters interweave with our own lives and imagination. We can’t wait to hear more from both of them as they chat about the messy business of what it means to love and live creatively.

Thant Myint-U, award-winning writer, historian and conservationist, served for over a decade with the United Nations and was an advisor to the Burmese government during the early years of the transition from military dictatorship.

The Hidden History of Burma is a fascinating insider’s account of a country at breaking point despite such hope for change following the end of the military dictatorship. This is essential reading for all those interested in this fragile state, its position between China and India and in broader political terms how to build democracy and an economy that serves its people well.
‘Thant Myint-U is the greatest living historian of Burma.’ William Dalrymple

‘A sobering account, told elegantly and eruditely. The Hidden History of Burma should become a guiding reference work for how we view the new Myanmar.’ Financial Times

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean lawyer and writer, whose debut story collection An Elegy for Easterly won the Guardian First Book prize in 2009.  Her new novel Out of Darkness, Shining Light tells the story of the body of the explorer David Livingstone and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles to the coast so that he could be buried in his own country.  It has already been hailed as one of the books of the year and we can’t wait to hear more.

‘An incredible and important book by a masterful writer’ Yaa Gyasi

Petina will be in conversation with Maya Jaggi, the award-winning cultural journalist and critic who writes on global literature and art for the Financial Times, New York Review of Books and Guardian Review, and was formerly on the staff of the Guardian. She is artistic director of Sea of Stories on the Gulf of Poets, a summer talks series in Liguria, and Critic at Large for Words Without Borders in New York.

Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies and unmarked graves but dotted throughout this remote land are pianos – grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, and humble, Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. Sophy Roberts goes in search of them and as well as a remarkable travel account of Russia’s wild east, she tells the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood.  

Sophy will be chatting to Horatio Clare, whose most recent books The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal and his fine retracing of JS Bach’s footsteps Something of His Art are both just out in paperback.

‘An extraordinary, cadenced journey into music, exile and landscape.’ Edmund de Waal