The Bookshelf
The Bookshelf
ABC Australia
Mystery in new fiction from Ben Okri, Sameer Pandya and Anjet Daanje
54 minutes Posted Jul 3, 2025 at 6:00 am.
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Show notes
The same question is at the heart of three very different international novels on The Bookshelf this week, “What really happened”…
To a WWI soldier who has forgotten his name and identity in The Remembered Soldier by Dutch author Anjet Daanje?
To a fortune teller for the elite class in Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted?
When four high achieving American boys entered a cave, and one emerged terribly hurt, In Sameer Pandya’s Our Beautiful Boys?
Keep scrolling for a full list of all books mentioned on this week's program.
 
BOOKS
Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier (translated from the Dutch by David McKay), Scribe 
Ben Okri, Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted, Apollo 
Sameer Pandya, Our Beautiful Boys,  Bloomsbury  
 
GUESTS 
Tom Wright, theatre writer and adapter, and Artistic Associate at Belvoir Street Theatre.
Bronwyn Rivers, researcher and novelist whose debut, The Reunion was released this year. She also has a PhD on the 19th century novel.
 
OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED
Bronwyn Rivers, The Reunion
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing With Feathers
Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
Ben Okri, The Famished Road
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Ben Okri, The Freedom Artist
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
Curzio Malaparte, The Skin
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Jackson Brodie Novel
 
CREDITS
Presenter, Kate Evans & Cassie McCullagh
Producer, Kate Evans & Salome Lines-Morison
Sound Engineer, Simon Branthwaite & Tegan Nicholls
Executive Producer, Rhiannon Brown