London Review Bookshop Podcast

The great M. John Harrison – ‘The closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard’ according to the New Statesman – returns to the shop to present his latest novel The End of Everything. In a post-apocalyptic Britain a beachcomber makes his living collecting artefacts washed up on the Channel shore. But when he comes across a strange, shape-shifting creature he realises he must take it inland, before it destroys everything he knows. The author was in conversation with Julia Armfield, author of Private Rites, Our Wives Under the Sea and Salt Slow.

You can buy a copy of The End of Everything from the London Review Bookshop.
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In Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo) Brian Dillon explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. Dillon was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, author of The Silver Book.

You can buy a copy of Ambivalence ⁠from the London Review Bookshop⁠.
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In Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo) Brian Dillon explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. Dillon was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, author of The Silver Book.

You can buy a copy of Ambivalence from the London Review Bookshop.
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David Keenan’s Boyhood (White Rabbit) opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, blessed with the power to see into the past and future by a perhaps imaginary angel, leads us on a journey from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course – Glasgow, as the novel builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption. ‘A complete triumph’ writes Irvine Welsh. ‘It slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove.’ David Keenan read from Boyhood, and talked about its themes, with LRB contributing editor Andrew O’Hagan.

You can buy a copy of Boyhood from the London Review Bookshop.
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Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundary burning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists, Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it.

You can buy a copy of The Wonderful World That Almost Was from the London Review Bookshop.
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