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A seasonal theme of light and darkness, inclusion and exclusion, runs through this edition of Open Book, presented by Chris Power.

Chris interviews the Irish author Claire Keegan about her intensely compassionate new novel, Small Things Like These, set in a small rural town in 1985. Her protagonist, Bill Furlong, a timber- and coal-merchant with five daughters, makes a discovery about what goes on behind the locked doors of the convent which looms above the town - a discovery that will challenge the precarious security of his own household. Claire confesses that she never does any research for her novels, and draws entirely on the power of the imagination, but that she writes as many as 40 drafts before publication. And she explains why it is harder to write about cruelty than kindness.

The actor and author Alan Cumming answers Open Book's returning question, what is the book you would never lend?
And, inspired by a new book by Peter Davidson, Chris chairs a discussion with authors Charlotte Mendelson and Andrew Michael Hurley about the motif of the lighted window in art and literature.

Producer: Beaty Rubens

Book List – Sunday 12 December and Thursday 16 December

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Foster by Claire Keegan
Antarctica by Claire Keegan
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan
The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway
Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life by Alan Cumming
The Lighted Window by Peter Davidson
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley
The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Knights by Andrew Michael Hurley
Iliad by Homer
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Number 13 by M. R. James
The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Oysters by Anton Chekhov