City of Books

Famously, King Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. That's what everyone knows about the Greek myth. But Carlo Gébler sets out to humanise the story.

He talks about his novel I Antigone set in the seventh century BC, and why Antigone is his narrator: because she had "skin in the game" as both daughter and sister to Oedipus.

He says the story remains compelling thousands of years later because it is a family tragedy.

For more on Carlo Gébler's novel:

https://www.newisland.ie/fiction/i-antigone

Presented and produced by Martina Devlin

Louis de Bernières may be known worldwide as the author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - but at nineteen, teaching in Colombia, he was known for something else. Dancing like a chicken.

He talks to City of Books about how "we raised a lot of dust, raised a lot of fun" during that life-changing period in South America. It taught him to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who influenced his work.

For more on his latest novel, The Autumn of the Ace: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1117235/the-autumn-of-the-ace/9781787301337.html

City of Books is produced and presented by Martina Devlin.

Playwright Rosaleen McDonagh talks about her activism, disability campaigning, journey through adult education which led to a Phd, and weaving together elements of Traveller culture and settled culture, forging an identity from them.

She tells her powerful story in a collection of essays, Unsettled, dedicated to her family. And she speaks with pride about the current generation of articulate, engaged, ambitious Travellers.

Produced and presented by Martina Devlin

For more on Unsettled: https://skeinpress.com/product/unsettled/

A chance meeting with a professor of circus fired children’s writer Sarah Webb’s imagination and led to her latest novel.

Sarah learned how Ireland had the second circus in the world in the late 1700s, with stunt riding, clowns, acrobats - and bee charming, or riding with a necklace of live bees.

Her novel, The Little Bee Charmer of Henrietta Street (for eight to 12-year-olds), was the result. It blends tenement life in 1911 Dublin with circus life.

Presented and produced by Martina Devlin

More on the book here: https://obrien.ie/the-little-bee-charmer-of-henrietta-street

“I really don't like the fact that sometimes I'm referred to as kind of a controversial novelist because I don't feel that I am,” says John Boyne, whose novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has sold 11 million copies and mounting, and has been reimagined as a film, play, ballet and opera.

The sequel – All The Broken Places – imagines life after the Holocaust for some of the characters in the 2006 novel, which saw life in a concentration camp through the eyes of two small boys.

“I'm not controversial as a person,” he says. “I'm not a provocateur at all as a person. And I certainly don't mean to come across that way either in the books that I write or in my interviews.

“I'm not immune to the fact people have criticised The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in more recent years – not for the first 14 or so years of its publication. And I'm not immune to the fact that there's a vocal amount of people who feel I should never be writing a book like All The Broken Places. But I also feel what can we do as writers but write the book that feels right to us at the time?"

He says The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has become “almost a touchstone” for people who feel negativity towards him. But with any writing project, he feels the fear and does it anyway.

All The Broken Places is published by Penguin Random House. More here https://johnboyne.com/book/all-the-broken-places/