Joining John and Andy for this episode are novelist Marie Phillips and novelist, screenwriter and poet Joe Dunthorne. The book we are discussing is Gerard Reve's debut novel De Avonden aka The Evenings: A Winter’s Tale, which caused a sensation when published in the Netherlands in 1947 and is now considered a classic. In the words of Herman Koch, it may be 'the funniest, most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written'. Reve was only 24; he went on to have a long, successful and frequently scandalous career but only a handful of his books have been translated into English.

Joe Dunthorne is novelist and poet and was born and brought up in Swansea. His debut novel, Submarine, was translated into twenty languages and made into an award-winning film. His second novel, Wild Abandon, won the Society of Authors’ Encore Award. His latest is The Adulterants. His first collection of poems, O Positive, was published by Faber in 2019, and his tremendous short story All the Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything to Everyone, appeared in the same year as Rough Trade pamphlet..

Marie Phillips is an author whose works include the international bestseller Gods Behaving Badly, a first novel that was also translated into twenty languages. The Table of Less Valued Knights was longlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2015 and Oh, I Do Like to Be..., a seaside reworking of Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors, was published by Unbound by 2019. Reviewing the book in the Spectator, Andy called it ‘fast, clever and significantly funnier than the original’. Marie is the co-writer of the BBC Radio Four series Warhorses of Letters. She recently spent several years living in Amsterdam, where she trained as a professional storyteller.

Also in this episode John digs Bella Bathurst's new book Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land and Andy surveys Landscapes of Detectorists and finds some prose to treasure.

Books mentioned:

Gerard Reve - The Evenings; Childhood: Two Novellas; Parent’s Worry
Joe Dunthorne - Submarine; Wild Abandon; The Adulterants; O Positive; All the Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything to Everyone
Marie Phillips - Gods Behaving Badly; The Table of Less Valued Knights; Oh, I Do Like to Be…
Innes M. Keighren & Joanna Northcup (eds) - Landscapes of the Detectorists
Bella Bathurst - Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land
Peter Blevgad - Imagine, Observe, Remember
Tessa Norton & Bob Stanley - Excavate! The Wonderful & Frightening Word of the Fall
J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Thomas Bernhard - Concrete