London Review Bookshop Podcast

Historian Colin Grant and WritersMosaic writers have travelled the length and breadth of the country to gather the voices and experiences of immigrants living in Britain. In What We Leave We Carry we meet, amongst others, a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, and a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain. Grant was in conversation with the author, broadcaster and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen.
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Erin Maglaque’s first book, Presence, explores the hidden history of the female body through deep archival research: fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries come together to make tangible a vanished past, unfamiliar because of its deliberate suppression. The artist Celia Paul has described Presence as ‘a landmark book’, which makes the female body in the past ‘real as never before’. Maglaque was in conversation with Hannah Dawson, a historian of political thought at King’s College London and the editor of The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing.

You can buy a copy of Presence from the London Review Bookshop.
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The kitchen has always been a complex space for women: a place of labour and gendered expectations, as well as a site of nourishment, care and company. But how does this change when you’re alone, not cooking for family or friends, but simply for yourself? In The Spinster Cookbook (Indigo Press) Eli Davies explores what happens when food is uncoupled from domestic duty and romantic relationships and what it means to cook (or not) for yourself and by yourself. Davies was in conversation with Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires and editor at Vittles magazine.
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Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador), was nominated for the Forward Prize, the Costa, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Sparrow on the Rooftop (Chatto & Windus) is the eagerly-awaited follow-up: Saba Sams has described it as ‘gruesome and intimate, alive to the rot, funny’. Long read from the collection and was in conversation with Sarah Howe, poetry editor at Chatto, whose own second collection Foretokens was published last year.

You can buy a copy of Sparrow on the Rooftop from the London Review Bookshop.
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In Michael Bracewell’s new novella The Smiths an anonymous narrator recounts the impact of the iconic pop group on his life. Accompanied by the French actress Carole Bouquet he embarks on a picaresque journey from the old Selfridge Hotel to West Hollywood, via a park bench in Cavendish Square. Deeply romantic and laced with comedy - not unlike the band themselves – The Smiths is an affectionate celebration of a pivotal episode in popular music history. The author read from his work, and discussed it with the novelist and journalist Leo Robson.

You can buy a copy of The Smiths from the London Review Bookshop.
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