London Review Bookshop Podcast

Attention (Jonathan Cape) collects for the first time Booker prize-winning novelist Anne Enright’s non-fiction. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, taking us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, delving into Enright’s own family history and offering new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. Enright was in conversation with Clair Wills, author of Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets.

In Remedies (Hazel Press) playwright, poet, novelist, biographer, historian and much else besides Julia Blackburn meditates on the images, amulets and incantations that have been used to cure illnesses from ancient times to the present day, offering a set of poetic keys to unlock the mysterious, subtle space between mind and body. Blackburn was in conversation with the folklorist Sarah Clegg, author of The Dead of Winter and Woman’s Lore.

The Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile engineering masterwork, carries water from the Owens Valley, across the desert to a barren corner of California. Without it, the city of Los Angeles and the film industry as we know it would not exist. In Aqua (Canongate) writer and film-maker Chiara Barzini explores this contested land and waterscape, blending travel writing, philosophy, cultural history and memoir in a hugely entertaining meditation on water, film, dreams versus reality, and an empire on the brink of catastrophe. Barzini was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, who has described Aqua as ‘outrageously good’ and ‘unforgettable’.

ena Khalaf Tuffaha was born in Seattle but grew up in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and her poetry reflects on her Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage and on her experience as a first-generation American immigrant. In Something About Living (the87press), winner of the National Book Award in 2024, her poems interweave the history of Palestinian suffering and resistance with the challenges of living in a world full of violence and the gentle pleasures we embrace in order to survive that violence. Tuffaha will be reading from her work, and discussing it with writer, bookseller and film curator So Mayer, whose most recent book is Bad Language.

Over the last four decades, Lynne Tillman has established herself as one of America's most audacious writers with works such as Haunted Houses (1986) and Weird Fucks (2021). In Thrilled to Death (Peninsula) Tillman has curated a definitive selection from her short fictions, by turns outrageous and melancholy, meditative and abrupt. Tillman read from her work, and was in conversation with Brian Dillon.