Lionel Shriver interview: Me and my Money

Lionel Shriver is the author of 16 novels, including the international bestseller We Need To Talk About Kevin (2003).

It was made into a film of the same name for which Tilda Swinton was nominated for a Best Actress Bafta Award and a Best Actress Golden Globe Award in 2011. Her books have been translated into 28 languages. 

Now 66, she lives outside Lisbon with her husband, jazz musician Jeff Williams.

What did your parents teach you about money?

Not to spend it! They were very frugal. In the latter part of my life, what has been difficult for me is learning to spend money. The problem with the saving mentality is that it is fundamentally based on a misconception of immortality, especially as I don't have any children and at a certain point, you have to realise that it's merely a means to an end. When you're a saver, that's hard to understand.

Roxy Dunn interview

Video interview with Roxy Dunn, first time author of novel As Young As This, published by Penguin on 6th April 2023.

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah.

These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. Since she was seventeen, she's pictured them like stepping stones - each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she's always imagined in her future. From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she's soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair.

As Young as This is a debut aimed at fans of Dolly Alderton, Meg Mason and Monica Heisey. Roxy is joined in conversation by literary journalist Alex Peake-Tomkinson as they delve into the ways that people shape us, the plans we make for our lives, and what it means to let go.

“A young woman’s life, told through the men she has dated. With glorious attention to detail and emotional fluency, Dunn charts the ways in which we are built and broken by love.” Pandora Sykes

“Raw, funny and beautiful…a really gorgeously observed novel about youth and womanhood.” Daisy Buchanan

Monocle Podcast on Zadie Smith's 'The Fraud'

In more than two decades since Zadie Smith burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, White Teeth, her books, essays and short stories have continued to enjoy commercial and critical success. Her latest novel brings to life the story of the Tichborne case – one of the lengthiest trials in British history and one that enthralled Victorian England. I joined Robert Bound and Alex Preston to review Smith’s first exuberant foray into historical fiction.

We also made recommendations for further reading and watching.

Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees, is a story she has been wanting to write for a long time, she tells me from a book-lined room in her house in London.

It focuses on two lovers – Kostas and Defne – from different sides of the divide in 70s war-torn Cyprus, and flashes forward to the life of the couple’s teenage daughter in London in the late 2010s.

It is also, improbably but effectively, partly narrated by a fig tree. This device enabled the Turkish-British novelist to broach the subject of the Cypriot conflict.

“I couldn’t dare to write about it because it’s such an emotionally charged subject,” she says. “It was only when I found the voice of the fig tree that I felt free to rise above, a little bit, these conflicting nationalisms and tell the story.”

The tree in question is in a tavern in Cyprus frequented by Kostas, a Greek Christian, and Defne, a Turkish Muslim.

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the novelist Katie Kitamura, and their two small children. He received a £1.25m advance for his first novel, The Impressionist (2002), while Booker Prize-winning novelist Aravind Adiga recently said: “The book I wish I’d written? Whatever Hari Kunzru is publishing next.”

Life, then, appears to have been relatively kind to Kunzru. So why did he feel the need to delve into the cesspit of the alt-right for his latest novel, Red Pill? “I wanted to write a book about privacy and surveillance initially, then I got a residency in Berlin,” he says. “I was in Wannsee, which is a sleepy suburb. There’s a lake and it’s not the hipster Berlin of Mitte or Kreuzberg. It was the middle of winter, so it was kind of bleak, dead.

“On the other side of the lake, visible from my desk, was the Wannsee Conference house, where they plotted the Final Solution. It became clear I had to set something in Berlin, then it got wrapped up with the alt-right. I’ve been online since 1992 and I’ve always dug around in the subcultures of the internet.”

Interview with Tayari Jones

When I arrive at her publishers in Bloomsbury, Tayari Jones is in the middle of signing 5000 book plates which will be bound into the UK edition of her novel Silver Sparrow. Such are the demands on her since her novel An American Marriage won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

She is resolutely professional but also clearly somewhat up against it on this short UK visit. She actually wrote Silver Sparrow before An American Marriage but she has deep affection for the earlier novel – its characters are “my favourite people”, she says – which was published in the UK in March 2020.

The novel is about a bigamist called James Witherspoon who has two teenage daughters, Dana and Chaurisse, with different mothers. James lives with Chaurisse and her mother but visits Dana and her mother on a weekly basis – Dana knows about Chaurisse but Chaurisse initially has no idea Dana exists.