New This Month

Siân Thomas reads Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw, a semi-autobiographical novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989. Powerfully evocative and densely observed, the novel relates the itinerant life of Billi, who moves from the Kaiser’s Germany to wider Europe in between the two World Wars. The narrator tells of her apprenticeship to life in a world-shaping era and the many teachers she meets along the way, including the Huxleys, Aldous and Maria, who nurture Billi’s ambition to become a writer. We also have James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold, one of the great novels in the Irish comic tradition, read by Gerry O’Brien, as well as Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta, a light-hearted, urban tale, offering a different side of the author, read by Fenella Woolgar.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of Billi, a girl growing up in Europe between the two…

One of the great novels in the Irish comic tradition, The Crock of Gold (1912) consists of six parts. Bringing together pagan gods, policemen, prisoners, leprechauns and animals, the narrative…

Opportunistic, shrewd and beautiful, Ethelberta resolves to disguise her humble beginnings and elevate her position in society. Crafting her career as a society poet and staging her family as her…

The NAB Blog: The Prevention of Literature – Censorship and Freedom

Earlier this year there was much media coverage surrounding the publication of new editions of books by Roald Dahl. Potentially offensive words had been eliminated or changed… Augustus Gloop was no longer enormously fat, the Oompa Loompas had become gender …

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