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Mariella Frostrup talks to Maggie O'Farrell about her new novel "Instructions For A Heatwave." Set in the infamous drought of 1976 when it did not rain in the UK for 16 weeks, it opens with recently retired Robert walking out to buy a newspaper and failing to return. With his wife of three decades, Gretta, baffled and distressed, his departure precipitates the return of their three estranged children, Aoife, Monica and Michael Francis forcing past tensions to the surface with far reaching consequences. Maggie O'Farrell has been described as a British Anne Tyler and has written a series of award winning novels since her debut the Betty Trask winning After You'd Gone was published in 2000. Her last novel The Hand That First Held Mine won the Costa Novel Award.With over a quarter of adults in the UK officially classed as obese how are fat characters being presented in the contemporary novel. Writer Jami Attenberg, whose novel The Middlesteins features a 300 pounds Jewish mama who is eating herself to death and Michael Kimball author of Big Ray, a novel based on his own experience growing up with a father who when he died - as a result of weight induced illnesses -weighed over 500 pounds, discuss the way in which fiction is responding to a world of fast food, compulsive eating and morbid obesity. How do writers of the 21st century portray what Virginia Woolf described as the "daily drama of the body" in an age in which the body has become the focus of a health crisis on an unprecedented scale?With recent headlines announcing that the new year's high street sales figures are a train wreck, and with well known names such as HMV, Jessops, Blockbuster, Comet and Republic going bust, how is one of the UK's most iconic retailers WH Smiths - over a quarter of whose sales are books - weathering the storm? Journalist and ex-editor of the Bookseller Neill Denny on the secret of Smiths success and other news from the world of books retail, including what are the future prospects for Waterstones and how big a threat is the 20 pence e-book?Producer: Hilary Dunn.