London Review Bookshop Podcast

Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth has been a shop favourite ever since we discovered Long Live the Post Horn, a powerful tale about loneliness and the struggle between capitalism and humanity told through the microcosm of the Norwegian postal service.

Hjorth is in conversation with Catherine Taylor to discuss Repetition (Verso), her sixth novel to be published in English, translated by her indefatigable champion Charlotte Barslund. As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to re-examine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.

Catherine Taylor is a writer and critic and the former deputy director of English PEN. Her first book, The Stirrings, won the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize for memoir and life-writing.

More from the Bookshop:

Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠

From the LRB:

Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod

Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod

LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod

Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his latest novel Your Life Without Me (Canongate) journalist and novelist James Meek investigates the unpredictable links between personal trauma, family dysfunction and political violence. A retired schoolmaster is invited by the police to meet a former pupil accused of plotting to destroy St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘This is his best novel yet, writes Alex Preston, ‘a dark and unsettling meditation on marriage, fatherhood and architecture. Every page rings with deep truth.’ James read from his book, and was in conversation about it with the writer Lara Pawson.

You can by a copy of Your Life Without Me from the London Review Bookshop.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between a quarter and a fifth of young people in the UK now suffer a mental disorder. One in four adults are prescribed psychiatric medication. These numbers represent a huge and recent expansion in mental health labelling, but reveal nothing of the experience of those seeking help.

In The Unfragile Mind, Gavin draws on conversations with patients, colleagues, and his thirty years of practice to explore the chequered history of psychiatry, the nature of mental health and ill-health, and the problems - including mood disorders, trauma, anxiety and addiction - that he addresses daily. The mind, he argues, is dynamic and adaptive - better addressed not with rigid labels and protocols, but with curiosity, kindness, humility and hope.

Francis was in conversation with Philippe Sands.

You can buy a copy of The Unfragile Mind from the London Review Bookshop.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anouchka Grose, a psychotherapist specialising in climate anxiety, became disillusioned with the apparent futility of activism as it is normally conceived, resolved to look inwards, seeking a way to revolutionise the self in response to polycrisis. The Revolution Will Be Internalised (Indigo) documents that inward journey, encompassing ego-dismantling retreats, animal communication, and tantra. Grose will be in conversation about her work with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered, Daddy Issues and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again.

You can buy a copy of The Revolution Will Be Internalised from the London Review Bookshop.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Tell Me How You Eat (Hutchinson Heinemann), Amber Husain draws on her own experience of the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders as well as on an omnivorous diet of reading that ranges from Eleanor Marx to the Black Panthers and beyond to ask profound questions about our relationship with food, and what a truly healthy diet might be, both for ourselves and for society as a whole. She was in conversation with Emily LaBarge, author of Dog Days.

You can buy a copy of Tell Me How You Eat from the London Review Bookshop.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices