Show Notes
After last month’s crowd-pleasers, Bobby and Pandora sink their teeth into two very different, equally meaty books. In Augustown by Kei Miller, a “dismal little valley” in Jamaica becomes a boiling pot of tension when a young boy’s dreadlocks are cut off. And in Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, the boiling pots are a little more literal – and Pandora shares an all-timer of a kitchen horror story.
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Books/articles mentioned: Augustown by Kei Miller Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin The Pisces and Milk Fed by Melissa Broder When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà Good Material and Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo Big Fish by Daniel Wallace Life of Pi by Yann Martel Trespasses by Louise Kennedy Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie The Bread The Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini Heartburn by Nora Ephron Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger Takeaway by Angela Hui
PRE-ORDER SMALL HOURS by Bobby Palmer
Augustown by Kei Miller Review by Natasha Tripney for The Observer
“Augustown”: A Novel of the Sacred and the Profane in Jamaica by Laura Miller for The New Yorker
Scalding oil, racist prank calls and endless ‘lid duty’: growing up in a Chinese restaurant by Angela Hui for The Guardian
Find out more about the ShelterBox Book Club
Books for episode 10: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume
Sound by Joel Grove and production by Pandora Sykes
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More from Book Chat
A bittersweet episode of Book Chat has Pandora and Bobby discussing two fittingly bittersweet books: Stoner by John Williams and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Also, “some news”, a hearty goodbye, and a look back on some of our Book Chat faves from episodes past.
We bring two books both published in 1970 to the table. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by “the poet laureate of puberty” Judy Blume, and The Bluest Eye, by the legendary Toni Morrison.
It’s a bumper episode 8, with Pandora and Bobby tackling two million-copy-bestselling, much-loved-movie-inspiring titans of the nineties. In Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, Pandora finds a surprisingly feminist heroine who’s no less funny 25 years on. And in Nick Hornby’s beloved High Fidelity, Bobby meets his match in a perpetually depressed man-boy who needs to love himself before anyone else can love him back.
Book Chat is back, and episode 7 pits a Pulitzer-winning author against a Nobel-winning author. But not really: in the battle of the Annies whose name ends in ‘X’, both Bobby and Pandora are winners. Discussing Close Range by Annie Proulx, Bobby feels the need to make apologies for the unapologetic bleakness of rural Wyoming – while Pandora is transported back to the excruciating experience of Catholic boarding school girlhood in Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story.
Episode 6 takes on one little known book and one very, very well-known book. Pandora finally reads A Visit from the Goon Squad and falls in love with Jennifer Egan's entire canon, while Bobby has mixed feelings about one of Pandora's absolute favourite books of recent times, When I Hit You, about a woman's violent marriage to a communist professor in South India.