The Book on One – RTE Radio 1
The Book On One (RTE Radio 1) is a show dedicated to the enjoyment of the some of the best authors and their books. One book a week is chosen from the vast range and variety of writing from around the world and selected readers (sometimes the actual authors) read selected extracts from the books
Listed below are the books that have featured on the Book on One (RTE Radio One) for the past number of years.
The Book on One show is broadcast on RTE Radio 1 late at night (typically 11:45pm) during the week. If you don’t live in Ireland and you want to listen to Radio 1 then you can listen to it on-line by clicking here.
Clicking on the links below will bring you to the complete list of books featured on The Book on One.
From Monday 3rd – Friday 7th November
”The Darkness of Wallis Simpson and Other Stories” by Rose Tremain is being read on the Book on One.
Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American woman for whom Edward Vlll abdicated in 1936, ended her life as the prisoner of her lawyer who would not allow anyone – friend, foe or journalist – to visit her in her Paris flat. Rose Tremain takes this true story and transforms it into an imaginative and ironic fiction. Her thesis is that Wallis, gaga and bed-ridden, has forgotten the king who gave up an empire for love of her. The other stories in this magnificent collection range over a variety of themes, equally original and unexpected. An East German border guard, redundant after the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989, imagines that he might still have a purpose in life: he tries to reach Russia by bicycling across the hostile wastes of Poland. A jilted man gets his revenge. A baby grows wings. A character in an “Impressionist” painting escapes from his ‘frame’ – or does he? And there’s a Christmas story set in a seedy hotel…
About the Author:
Rose Tremain lives in North London and Norwich, with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have won many prizes including the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year.
Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker and made into a film; The Colour was shortlisted for the Orange and selected by the Daily Mail Reading Club. Her most recent collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was shortlisted for both the First National Short story Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and her most recent novel, The Road Home, won the Orange Prize for fiction 2008. Two of her books (The Colour and The Way I Found Her) are in development as films, and she is currently working on a TV screenplay to star Sir Ian McKellen.
Monday 27th October- Friday 31st October
HONOUR THY FATHER Eamonn McGrath BlackStaff Press 1990
Set in County Wexford, Honour Thy Father is a graceful and honest study of a growing child’s experience of Irish rural life. McGrath explores familiar study material – a loveless marriage, provincial small-mindedness, boarding school brutality, adolescent sexuality and first love – but breathes new life and vigour into it through his startling freshness of expression and insight.
Eamonn McGrath died this year on May 5th, 2008. May he rest in peace.
Goodnight Ballivor, I’ll Sleep in Trim by John Quinn was on The Book on One from Monday 24 October until Friday 24 October.
Description
Not another memoir of childhood? Well, yes actually. Not another regressive desire to capture a golden weren’t-we-poor-but-happy age? Well, no. Nor a pursuit of misery and repression either. This is simply a journey into the author s past in the quiet, sleepy midlands village of Ballivor sixty odd years ago. This book grew out of the radio documentary Goodnight Ballivor, I ll Sleep in Trim. That expression, common to those who grew up in Ballivor, yet shrouded in mystery, was the obvious title to give to a radio memoir. The wonderful reaction to it surprised the author, but it shouldn t have. It was the old story of the local being universal. Twelve years after the documentary was first broadcast, the author has finally acceded to the many requests to put this rich tapestry of his own memories, and those of his counterparts, into print.
About the Author
JOHN QUINN is a much-loved broadcaster and radio producer who was the recipient of numerous prestigious radio awards during his twenty-five years with RTÉ. He is also an accomplished author and writer of fiction and non-fiction, including Sea of Love, Sea of Loss, an intimate and inspiring book, written as a tribute to his late wife Olive. A skilful and engaging storyteller, his children s novel, The Summer of Lily and Esme, was described as an instant classic and won the 1992 Bisto Children s Book of the Year. His most recent work, The Will to Win (co-written with Sean Boylan), was published in September 2006. John Quinn lives in Clarinbridge, Co. Galway.
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson was broadcast on The Book on One from October 13 until October 17.
Synopsis:
In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events – the accidental death of a child, his best friend’s feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father’s decision to leave the family for another woman – will change his life forever. An early morning adventure out stealing horses leaves Trond bruised and puzzled by his friend Jon’s sudden breakdown. The tragedy which lies behind this scene becomes the catalyst for the two boys’ families gradually to fall apart. As a 67-year-old man, and following the death of his wife, Trond has moved to an isolated part of Norway to live in solitude. But a chance encounter with a character from the fateful summer of 1948 brings the painful memories of that year flooding back, and will leave Trond even more convinced of his decision to end his days alone.
About the Author: Per Petterson was born in 1952 and was a librarian and bookseller before he published his first work, a volume of short stories, in 1987. Since then he has written three novels which have established his reputation as one of Norway’s best fiction writers. To Siberia and In the Wake are also published by Harvill in English translation.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was featured on The Book on One for the week of October 6 until October 10 on RTE Radio 1
Synopsis:
‘Why has it taken more than half a century for this wonderful flight of humor to be rediscovered?’ – “Guardian”. ‘The sweetest grown-up book in the world’ – “Sunday Times”. ‘Everyone, no matter how poor or prim or neglected, has a second chance to blossom in the world’ – “Daily Mail,” in reference to “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day“. A major film to be released in 2008 and starring Frances McDormand, “Miss Pettigrew Lives for Day” is a delightful, funny, lighthearted novel. First published in 1938, it was reissued in the United Kingdom in 2000, complete with thirty-five original illustrations, and has sold over 22,000 copies. Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children.When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamor that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.
The Author: Winifred Watson (1907-2002) grew up in Newcastle, and was a secretary until, in 1935, she married Leslie Pickering, the manager of a timber firm. She wrote six novels in all, but after the birth of her son in 1941 she stopped writing and lived quietly in Newcastle for the rest of her life.
The End of a Relationship was featured from Sep 29 – Oct3, a short story from a most imaginatively brilliant writer, Will Self. The story is taken from his gleefully subversive collection of short stories – Grey Area.
Synopsis: A Woman leaves her boyfriend and spends the rest of the day bouncing from person to person, meeting rejection at every corner.
“Grey Area”, like all of Will Self’s fiction, is funny, bizarre and disturbing. From a London where every waiter is an aspiring writer to a supply teacher killed by the colossal philistinism of his pupils, this is a truly inimitable showcase of short stories.
Buy Grey Area featuring “The End of a Relationship” on Amazon.co.uk
Excerpts from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the classic book that was read from Sep 22 until Sep 26.
Synopsis: Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach…Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby – young, handsome, fabulously rich – always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.
Buy The Great Gatsby on Amazon.co.uk
The Book on One September 15 – 19 is “Matters of Life and Death” by Bernard MacLaverty.
“Matters of Life and Death” is the finest collection of short stories yet from a contemporary master of the form. Beginning with the sudden, nauseating terror of a family caught up in an explosion of shocking sectarian violence and ending with the white-out of an Iowa blizzard and a different kind of fear, “Matters of Life and Death” is a book about bonds and connections, made and broken, secret and known. Vivid, beautifully controlled and written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are object lessons in the art of short fiction.
Synopsis: The Trojan Sofa tells the tale of a dodgy antiques dealer who incarcerates his son in a sofa and then delivers it to the buyer.
The next morning, when the residents of the house have left, the boy cuts his way out of the sofa and opens the door for his father, who steals anything of value as well as the modus operandi.
Featured (
Sep 1 – 5 , 8 – 12) is Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffery Chaucer. This book can be bought on Amazon.co.uk
Synopsis: Now listen with good will, as I go straight to my subject matter, in which you may hear the double sorrows of Troilus in his love for Criseyde, and how she forsook him before she died’
Previously featured as a reading on The Book on One from Monday 25 – Friday 29 August is REBECCA by Daphne du Maurier and Read by Alison Glennie.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again …Working as a lady’s companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers …Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity … REBECCA by Daphne du Maurier
Previously on The Book on One :: Monday 18 – Friday 22 August is
The Old Munster Circuit by Maurice Healy, read by Paschal Scott.
Monday 11 – Friday 15 August :: Jude: Level 1
Jude is a Tipperary-reared orphan who on his 18th birthday sets off to discover the wide world and his true parentage. His picaresque adventures take him first to the “Sodom of the West” – Galway – where he falls in love, encounters temptations galore and, disguised as Stephen Hawking, unwittingly blows up the HQ of a Multi-National Corporation – and himself. With his face reconstructed into the spitting image of Leonardo DiCaprio (apart from the small matter of an erectile nose) Jude travels on foot to the inferno of Dublin, in hot pursuit of Angela, ex-Galway chipshop employee and his True Love. A spectacular chase through the city of Ulysses ensues, transformed by Goughs talent into a dazzling metaphor of 21st century violence, alienation and progress.