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Dreams and Lies
This month Sam talks to Makenna Goodman about her latest novel Helen of Nowhere. Published by Fitzcarraldo and described by Jo Hamya as ‘the perfect fairytale for our times’, it is the story of Man - an academic dogged by allusions of disgrace and a publicly failed marriage. He seeks to start again and live a ‘good life’ far from the city and is drawn into the wilds to view a house which seems to offer him escape.
Set over five acts, Man is first question by Realtor, the estate agent seeking to sell him his dream home and then the eponymous Helen, the house’s former resident, whose ghost dextrously possesses the narrative as all pretence of reality falls away. 
Meanwhile, Lara meets with Ben Lerner to hear all about the quite superb Transcription. The writer, father of one and narrator of Ben's new novel has travelled to Providence where he went to college, and where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety year old mentor and father of his friend, Max. But after his narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. 
What unfolds from this dreamlike, nightmarish, circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate the memories that make us who we are, and a moving exploration of the experience of being a son, of becoming a man and of trying to be a ‘good’ father. 
Our own tape disintegration on this episode was entirely unintended but beautifully serendipitous. If you enjoy the episode, share it with friends, lovers, loved ones and book clubbers.
Big love x
Helen of Nowhere is published by Fitzcarraldo
Transcription is published by Granta
Music used on this episode: 
Hermanos Gutierrez - Nuevo Mondo 
Ian Hawgood - Upwards Eyes EP

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This month Sam talks to Madeleine Dunnigan about her debut novel Jean. It is set over the long, blazing summer of 1976  at Compton Manor, an isolated boarding school on the south downs. An oubliette, attended by a ragged assortment of boys who have all run out of road elsewhere. Jean is there too, searching desperately for himself among a violent mix of prejudice, antisemitism and predatory intentions. With no reliable actors in his life and cast away in the wilderness of the pre-internet era, he must navigate abandonment and his own irrepressible desire. 
Meanwhile Lara speaks to John Grindrod  about his fantastic new work of social history, Tales of the Surburbia. Throughout LGBTQ+ history, suburbia has been seen as somewhere to escape from. A place where hetrosexuality rules, where difference will not be tolerated and one where you’ll never find a soulmate. But for many, those streets of twitching curtains and pebble-dashed semis were - or still are - a place to call home. Tales of the Suburbs explores the untold 20th century tale of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people in suburbia. Through remarkable archive material and original interviews.
Jean is published by Daunt Books 
Tales of the Suburbs is published by Faber
Music Used on this episode
Small Town Boy - Jose Gonzalez (Sommerville, Bronski, Steinbachek)
There is a Light That Never Goes Out - Cyrus Nabipoor (Marr, Morrissey)
Hand On your Heart - Jose Gonzalez (Stock Aitken Waterman)
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This month Canongate publish Nation of Strangers, the third ‘instalment’ in a series by Turkish novelist, essayist and journalist Ece Temelkuran. Following on from How To Lose A Country and Together it is, once more, rooted in Ece’s forced displacement from her homeland.

Recorded last December at Canongate’s offices Sam met Ece to discuss this deeply personal and unflinching account of being ‘unhomed’. Nation of Strangers is centred on a loss that will resonate deeply with anyone who struggles - in the face of rising global authoritarianism - to recognise the country they call home. Written as a set of letters to a stranger it embraces humility and love as a rejection of the politics of cynicism and asks us once we recognise what is happening, (fascism) what choice do we have but to act?
'Her most ambitious an dazzling book yet.'
BRIAN ENO
'Ece Temelkuran is a brilliant thinker, and her work here is as conceptually illuminating as it is beautifully written .... both a call and a comfort, a book that made me feel so much less alone.'
OMAR EL AKKAD

Meanwhile, Lara meets up with James Meek to hear about his latest novel ‘Your Life Without Me’; a tale of loss, provocation and the radical discomfort of the new. Centred around a single act of destruction (the attempted demolition of St Paul’s Cathedral) it is a book which asks how much of the past we can hold on to if we are to build a future worth living in. And whether change is inherently and unavoidably destructive.

Praise for the novels of James Meek 
'A story so original and so fully imagined.'
HILARY MANTEL 
'The language is so fresh and crisp and sparkling.'
PHILIP PULLMAN

Music used in this episode:
Norfik - Realization
Ida Urd & Ingrid Høyland- Duvet
Ian Hawgood - I Don’t Think We Belong Here
Norfik - Denial

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ROBOTS AND KINGS
Two wonderful books to start the year.  Lara meets up with Rebecca Perry to hear all about her debut novel ‘May We Feed The King’. Already a firm favourite at Field HQ, it is the mesmeric story of a king who resists power and the curator who pursues their forgotten legacy. A huge recommend that is described by A.K. Blakemore as ‘A sort of perfect snow globe, presenting a decadent world in miniature that surprises us with the depth of its reflections on power, yearning and loneliness.’  
Get your copy here: https://granta.com/products/may-we-feed-the-king/
Meanwhile Sam speaks to James Muldoon about his latest book ‘Love Machines’, an exploration into the ways in which ‘artificial intelligence is transforming our relationships.’ In equal parts fascinating and terrifying it charts the cynical exploitation of loneliness, the erosion of reality’s fabric and the myriad ways in which we are being radically re-shaped by this technology.
Get Your Copy Here:
 https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571399277-love-machines/?srsltid=AfmBOopZ7N938xLuydls_QdygGMtTFfy6lSile0TQZudJc1t28vgFUnW

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Published by Granta earlier this autumn, Ben Pester’s debut novel is the story of Tom Crowley - a Willy Loman figure for our age - who is slowly and terrifyingly absorbed into the hallucinatory and labyrinthine surroundings of his work.  From the deceptive nature of Luke Bird’s day-glow cover art to the impenetrability of the novel’s work-speak The Expansion Project is deeply unnerving precisely for its recognisable qualities. The alienation, accountability and obsolesce of corporation life at the ever growing 'Capmeadow Business Park,’ a dystopic setting that absorbs memory and demands disassociation. 
‘A profoundly moving, extraordinary novel … Witty, touching, layered and entirely original’
Rose Ruane
‘A surrealist nightmare that flows with its own logic, humour, politics and plot energy’
Ross Raisin
‘This is a luminous and startling novel from a unique new voice.’
Samuel Fisher
GET YOUR COPY HERE 
https://granta.com/products/the-expansion-project/
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