Night Waves - Colm Toibin, Gauguin, Christopher Isherwood

Philip Dodd talks to the writer Colm Toibin - whose previous novel Brooklyn won the 2009 Costa Novel Award - about his new collection of short stories, The Empty Family. From the young Pakistani immigrant trying to settle in a strange town to the Irish woman reluctantly moving back to Dublin, Toibin's stories tell of people fleeing the past and returning home. Plus the critic Richard Cork and novelist Sarah hall discuss the French Post-Impressionist painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin, whose colourful images of women in Tahiti and landscape images of Brittany are included in a major retrospective of the artist at Tate Modern. And Christopher Isherwood. His novels include A Single Man and Goodbye to Berlin, on which the musical Cabaret was based. As Isherwood's diaries from the 1960's are published, editor Katherine Bucknell looks at his colourful progress through the decade of social and sexual revolution, including the emotional drama of his love for the American painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior. And the screenwriter Kevin Elyot talks about his adaptation of Christopher and his Kind, Isherwood's frank memoir about life in the bohemian underworld of 1930's Berlin. Producer: Natalie Steed.