Presenter Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to acclaimed American author Paul Theroux about his bestselling travel book Deep South.Īfter fifty years crossing the globe, seeking adventure and stories to tell about places far from home, Theroux travels deep into the heart of his native country and discovers a land as profoundly foreign as anything he has previously experienced abroad. Other novels about boarding schools mentioned in this programme include Make your Home among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James and Black Ice by Lorene Cary.

She forms intense friendships with other girls complicated relationships with teachers and an all-consuming infatuation with a boy from the cool crowd, all of which leads to conflicts with her parents back home in the mid-West, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, she becomes a shrewd observer of, and ultimately a participant in, their snobby culture and rituals. Set in an exclusive boarding school in north-eastern America, Prep is an insightful, caustic and funny coming-of-age story and a savage dissection of class, race, and gender.Ĭlever, aspirational Lee Fiora is fourteen years old when her father drops her at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts that she has won a scholarship to. It looks at the moments, big and small, that make us what we are.Best-selling American author Curtis Sittenfeld discusses her acclaimed debut novel, Prep. An exquisite novel about a simple life, it has already demonstrated its power to move thousands of readers with a message of solace and truth. Like John Williams' Stoner or Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, A Whole Life is a tender book about finding dignity and beauty in solitude. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII - where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus - and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken.

He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. Shortlisted for The 2016 Man Booker International PrizeĪndreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. Shortlisted for The 2017 International Dublin Literary Award Shortlisted for The 2017 National Translation Award

A whole life by robert seethaler