Information on books featured on The Book on One 2009 series.
Monday 21st - Friday 25th December
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny
An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.
One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.
Monday 14th - Friday 18th December
WASTED: A SOBER JOURNEY THROUGH DRUNKEN IRELAND by Brian O'Connell
Wasted is an honest, unflinching, and humorous reflection on life as a problem drinker. From a scholarship student at university to stealing sausage rolls at hot food counters, Brian O'Connell recounts his years spent accelerating his addiction, in a comic and self-deprecating fashion.
Monday 7th - Friday 11th December
AN UNSUNG HERO: Tom Crean, Antarctic Survivor by Michael Smith
Kerry-born Tom Crean ran away from home as a youth, and joined Scott's Discovery voyage in December 1901, not returning to England until 1904. He went back to the Antarctic with Scott on his fateful attempt on the South Pole, eventually having to bury him. By now one of the most experienced men in this extreme climate, he was invited to join Scott's great rival Shackleton on his Endurance expedition. Once again, he played a leading role, and sailed in the open James Caird across the southern ocean to South Georgia to sound the alarm for the stranded team in the Antarctic. After playing this heroic role in saving the mission, Crean retired to live quietly with his family in Ireland.
Read by Danny Sheehy
Monday 30th November - Friday 4th December
THE NICOTINE CAT AND OTHER PEOPLE by Augustus Young
The Nicotine Cat and Other People is a scrupulously truthful and wildly imaginative memoir by one of Ireland 's most singular poets and comic writers. Augustus Young darts through memories of his childhood in Cork , his career as a medical scientist in London and the life he now leads in a curious town on the French-Spanish border.
His 'people' include Father Dineen of the wonderful Irish Dictionary, the philosophers Kierkegaard and David Hume, a Scottish artist called Welsh, Joab Comfort who knows everything, and Alban Perfide, a surely imaginary novelist living out his own fiction. A wise book with a low centre of levity.
Read by Kieran Ahern
Monday 23rd - Friday 27th November
FRONTIER TOWN by Tony Canavan
Frontier Town examines Newry - one of the most interesting and dynamic towns in Ireland, is also one of the oldest. For more than five thousand years the area has been the centre of intense human activity: Neolithic settlement, the arrival of St. Patrick and Christianity, Viking and Norman invasions, the Williamite wars, the Newry Canal (the first true canal in these islands), the Great Famine emigration, the upheavals of the Home Rule crisis, partition and the Troubles.
Monday 16th - Friday 20th November
THE GREAT LOVER by Jill Dawson (Part 2)
In the summer of 1909, seventeen-year-old Nell Golightly is the new maid at the Orchard Tea Gardens in Cambridgeshire when Rupert Brooke moves in as a lodger. Famed for his looks and flouting of convention, the young poet captures the hearts of men and women alike, yet his own seems to stay intact. Even Nell, despite her good sense, begins to fall for him. What is his secret?
This captivating novel gives voice to Rupert Brooke himself in a tale of mutual fascination and inner turmoil, set at a time of great social unrest. Revealing a man far more complex and radical than legend suggests, it powerfully conveys the allure - and curse - of charisma.
Read by Alison Glennie
Monday 9th - Friday 13th November
THE GREAT LOVER by Jill Dawson (Part 1)
Read by Alison Glennie
Monday 2nd - Friday 6th November
From the Republic of Conscience: Stories inspired by The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Monday 26th - Friday 30th October
WALK THE BLUE FIELDS by Claire Keegan
A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. A Harvard student flies south to celebrate his birthday at his step-father's condominium by the sea. While the scent of hay drifts up from neighbouring fields, a teenage immigrant articulates the reason for her going. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair.
In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past, and it is against this landscape that the stories of Walk the Blue Fields so beautifully articulate all the yearnings of the human heart.
Monday 19th - Friday 23rd October
SILAS MARNER by George Eliot
Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.
Monday 12th - Friday 16th October
NATURE'S ENGRAVER: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow
At the end of the eighteenth-century Britain fell in love with nature. Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds marked the moment: the first 'field-guide' for ordinary people, illustrated by woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. Jenny Uglow tells a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life and the beauty of the wild - a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.
Read by David Bickley
Monday 5th - Friday 9th October
CAN LILY O'SHEA COME OUT TO PLAY? by Lily O'Connor
Lily O'Connor's book tells the memoirs of a Protestant child living in a Catholic community during the 1930s and 1940s which includes descriptions of Dublin tenement life during that period.
Read by Mary Murray
Monday 28th September - Friday 2nd October
MIGHTY HEART by Marianne Pearl
The tragic murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is well known. Why he was in Karachi; how he saw his role as an international journalist: why he was singled out for kidnapping; and where the incredible search effort led - are the subject of Mariane Pearl's book.
Read by Sharon Hogan
(First broadcast September, '07)
Monday 21st - Friday 25th September
BURNING BRIGHT by Tracy Chevalier
Read by Martina Carroll
(First broadcast June, '08)
Monday 14th - Friday 18th September
ALL FOR HECUBA by Micheál Mac Liammoir
From his days as a child actor in London, sharing the stage with Noel Coward, to founding the Gate Theatre in Dublin with his partner Hilton Edwards, and undertaking ambitious tours to pre-war Europe, Michael MacLiammoir's All For Hecuba combines autobiography with a biography of theatre and post-civil-war Ireland.
Read by Donncha Crowley
(First broadcast November, '08)
Monday 7th - Friday 11th September
THE SPEED OF LIGHT by Javier Cercas (Part 2)
Read by Gary Murphy
(First broadcast December, '08)
Monday 31st August - Friday 4th September
THE SPEED OF LIGHT by Javier Cercas
Read by Gary Murphy
(First broadcast December, '08)
Monday 24th - Friday 28th August
MEINI, THE BLASKET NURSE, by Leslie Matson
Read by Áine Moynihan
(First broadcast August, '05)
Monday 17th - Friday 21st August
THE LAST OF THE HEROES by Billy Keane
Read by Billy Keane
(First broadcast September, '05)
Monday 10th - Friday 14th August
THE GARDEN PARTY AND OTHER STORIES by Katherine Mansfield
Read by Alison Glennie
Monday 3rd - Friday 7th August:
THE TELLING YEAR, written and read by Malachi O'Doherty.
(First broadcast July, '07)
Monday 20th July - Friday 24th July
Eating Scenery: West Cork, The people and The Place
Written and read by Alannah Hopkin
Monday 13th July - Friday 17th July
CHRISTINE FALLS by Benjamin Black (Part Two)
Read by Paschal Scott
(First broadcast December, '06)
Monday 6th July - Friday 10th July
CHRISTINE FALLS by Benjamin Black (Part One)
Read by Paschal Scott
(First broadcast December, '06)
Monday 29 June - Friday 3 July
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM by Joan Didion
Read by Maria Herbst
(First broadcast July, '04)
Monday 22 - Friday 26 June
MIND THAT 'TIS MY BROTHER by Gaye Shortland
Read by Liam Heffernan
(First broadcast August, '08)
Monday 15 - Friday 19 June
CHERRIES IN THE SNOW by Emma Forrest
Read by Alison Glennie
(First broadcast August, '06)
Monday 8 - Friday 13 June
DIRTY HAVANA TRILOGY by Pedro Juan Gutierrez
Read by Frank Twomey
(First broadcast July, '08)
Monday 1 - Friday 5 June
RED MIST: ROY KEANE AND THE FOOTBALL CIVIL WAR, A FAN'S STORY by Conor O'Callaghan
Read by Gary Murphy
Monday 25 - Friday 29 May
A SPRING IN MY STEP by Joan McDonnell
In this spirited, humorous story we follow Joan's adventures with the fears and frustrations of her 'handicap'. Stricken with polio as a child she heads to Dublin hoping for a miracle. After three years and numerous operations she returns home to Limerick, changed. She walks with callipers and her absence from the poverty of home creates problems - Joan is a stranger there. She must learn to fit in.
As she sits by the River Shannon watching other children play, she fears the challenge. But with a theory about miracles and a penchant for breaking the rules, each disaster is a prologue to her next adventure.
Read by Martina Carroll
Monday 18 - Friday 22 May
STONE MAD by Seamus Murphy
Think of stonecarving in Ireland and it won't be long before the name Seamus Murphy comes to mind. In one of the oldest traditions in the world, Seamus carved his own niche to become one of the most respected sculptors in his field. Stone Mad is an account of his days as an apprentice where he learned to work the stone and discovered that there is no regularity in nature.
With hammer, mallet and chisel he shaped and fashioned rough boulders under the guidance of the master stonecarvers. Their unique voices emanate from the pages as Seamus allows the men to tell their own stories by using the language of the stonies.
A symbiotic relationship exists between the stonecarver and his chosen material. The full artistic potential of a piece of stone is realised by the stonecarver who can respect his material and take a suggestion from it. A good carver will learn to speak kindly to the stone. Seamus spent seven years romancing the stone and Stone Mad documents his years of joy and struggle. His artistic feeling for quality responded to his workmates reverence for the well made thing. The result is a book of surpassing beauty, full of warmth, humour and profound perception.
Read by Liam Heffernan
Monday 11 - Friday 15 May
ATOMISED by Michel Houellebecq - Part 1
Michel Houellebecq's dark and disturbing novel Atomised sees him establish himself as a unique and important voice in European letters. With his first work, Whatever, Houellebecq had created a sassy, street-wise bulletin of disaffected existentialism, and here that voice brilliantly extends its range.
Atomised (from the French Les Particules élémentaires) is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, who seem to represent two sides of Houellebecq himself (there are more than a few moments in the book where we feel we are reading a strange roman à clef).
Michel, a molecular biologist, finds ordinary, human emotions inexplicable, making him seem abstruse and cold. Bruno is his opposite: a frustrated libertine trapped in a body most find repellant. Through these skewed archetypes an intricate, sometimes quite moving story of the brothers' lives is formed.
Read by Conor Lovett
Monday 27 April - Friday 1 May
BEING THERE a novel by Jerzy Kosinski.
Being There by Jerzy Kosinski is a far-fetched story of how a humble gardener rises to a position of huge influence in Washington.
The timing of the broadcast is deliberate, as it marks the week when Barack Obama is inaugurated as President of the United States. Kosinski's satirical novel was successfully adapted for the Big Screen and starred Peter Sellers.
Read by Alf McCarthy
Monday 20 - Friday 24 April
A GOOD SCHOOL a novel by Richard Yates.
At fifteen, Terry Flynn had the face of an angel and the body of a perfect athlete. Set in a small boarding school on the eve of America's entry into World War Two, A Good School tells the story of William Grove, the nervous teenager trying to fit in; the betrayed alcoholic, Jack Draper; and, Edith Stone, the teacher's daughter, who falls in love with the most popular boy in school.
Instantly acclaimed on its first publication, peopled with some of Richard Yates' most memorable characters, this tender, spare masterpiece is a haunting meditation on the twilight of youth, and an unforgettable description of the impact of war on the lives of an innocent generation.
Read by Gary Murphy
Monday 13 - Friday 17 April
WITH MY LAZY EYE by Julia Kelly
Lucy's a misfit. She's growing up in a large family in a semi-detached house in Dublin, dreaming of being someone else and making her father proud. It's not looking promising. He's an internationally renowned academic, her siblings are bright achievers, but Lucy is lazy, directionless and never quite manages to succeed. Perhaps that's because she's not really trying. She hasn't got the energy to revise for exams, she can't convince herself to care about coming last and even when she goes to London and finds the perfect job, she is still destined to fail. It seems she's going nowhere fast. But when a family crisis forces Lucy to grow up, she's going to realise that if she wants a better life, she'll have to take matters into her own hands. Maybe then her dreams will come true.
Read by Hilary O'Shaugnessy
Monday 6 - Friday 10 April
HONOUR THY FATHER by Eamonn McGrath
Set in Co. Wexford, Honour Thy Father centres on a son's struggle for a deeper and more meaningful relationship with his father.
Sadly, the author, Eamonn McGrath, died in May 2008. His son, Garvan McGrath is the reader.
Read by Garvan McGrath
Monday 30 March - Friday 3 April, 11.13pm
MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY by Winifred Watson
Read by Alison Glennie
Monday 23 - Friday 27 March
THE BANYAN TREE by Christopher Nolan
Broadcast as a tribute to the author who died last month (Originally broadcast August, 1999)
Read by Ann Marie Horan
Producer: Cliodhna Ni Anluain
Monday 16 - Friday 20 March
NIS MHIC UIBHLEÁIN by Michael Ó Dubhshláine
To mark Seachtain na Gaeilge, The Book on One this week is Inis Mhic Uibleáin by Mícheál Ó Dúshlaine and is read by Dónal Mac Síthigh. The author's research on the older history and folklore of this Blasket Island is brought up to date in interviews with the late Taoiseach, Charles Haughey who bought it from the Ó Dálaigh family in the 1970s.
Read by Domhnall Mac Sithigh
Friday 13 March
Part 2 of THE DOG'S LIFE by Ragnar Almqvist from a collection of short stories titled Let's Be Alone Together
Read by Liam Heffernan
Thursday 12 March
Part 1 of THE DOG'S LIFE by Ragnar Almqvist from a collection of short stories titled Let's Be Alone Together
Read by Liam Heffernan
Wednesday 11 March
HEN NIGHT by David Butler from a collection of short stories titled These Are Our Lives
Read by Fiona McGarry
Tuesday 10 March
AVENGING THE STILTS MAN by Colin O'Sullivan from a collection of short stories titled, These Are Our Lives
Read by Frank Twomey
Produced by Aidan Mathews
Monday 9 March
SOUL MATE by Viv McDade from a collection of short stories titled Let's Be Alone Together
Read by Julie Sharkey
Monday 2 - Friday 6 March
CHRISTY RING: HURLING'S GREATEST by Tim Horgan
Read by Pascal Scott
Monday 23 - Friday 27 February
DEATH OF A CHIEFTIAN from a collection of short stories entitled A Ball of Fire by John Montague
Read by Peter Gaynor
Monday 16 - Friday 20 February
ZAPPA by Barry Miles
Read by Roger Gregg
Produced by Aidan Stanley
Monday 9 - Friday 13 February
KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN by Manuel Puig
Read by Frank Twomey
Producer: Aidan Stanley
Monday 2 - Friday 6 February 2009
A NIGHT IN TUNISIA written by Neil Jordan
Read by Gary Murphy
Producer: Aidan Stanley
Monday 26 - Friday 30 January 2009
ELEVEN HOUSES, a Memoir of Childhood by Christopher Fitz-Simon.
Read by the author
Producer: Aidan Stanley
Monday 12 - Friday 16 January 2009
THE TROJAN SOFA by Bernard MacLaverty from a short story collection called Matters of Life and Death
Read by Martina Carroll
Producer: Aidan Stanley
Monday 5 - Friday 9 January 2009
Brian Friel: Selected Stories by Brian Friel
Brian Friel celebrates his 80th Birthday this week so in honour of this famous playwright the Book on One is having some of his early work read on air.
Even though he's made his name worldwide as a playwright we've managed to discover some early prose writings which made an impact, way back in the 1960's. Amongst the short stories to be read by Pascal Scott are "The Saucer of Larks", "The Potato Gatherers" and "The Diviner" (a prefiguration of one of his finest plays "Faith Healer"), Admirers of Friel's drama will note that his first fiction found expression in the short story form. These are stories read with humour, resilience and dignity.and written with tact of a master.