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Susan Hill, Andrei Makine, and The Last Straight Face

Mariella Frostrup talks to Susan Hill, whose bestsellers include The Woman in Black. She discusses The Vows of Silence, her latest crime novel featuring detective Simon Serrailler.

Susan Hill
Mariella talks to Susan Hill, whose wide-ranging fictional output includes supernatural thrillers, children's books and now a successful series of crime novels featuring the detective Simon Serrailler. She talks about this creation, and why crime fiction is the perfect way for her to express her own fears about the state of the world.

Andrei Makine
The novelist Paul Bailey joins Mariella to discuss one of his favourite contemporary writers, the Russian 茅migr茅 Andrei Makine. A decade ago he became the first man to win two of France's most prestigious literary prizes, with the same book, in the process bringing himself to international attention. With his latest novel newly published in English, Paul picks some of his favourite works from Makine's output.

The Last Straight Face
Mariella talks to the authors of a frighteningly authentic fictional take on the criminal world. Eric Allison spent more than fifteen years incarcerated in prisons including Strangeways and Wormwood Scrubs. Now he's the prisons correspondent for a national newspaper and a campaigner for better conditions in British jails. He and his co-writer, the investigative journalist Bruce Kennedy Jones, explain how their knowledge of real criminals influenced their debut.

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30 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Sun 8 Jun 2008 16:00
  • Thu 12 Jun 2008 16:00

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