Open Book - 31/01/2010

Neel Mukherjee's debut novel, A Life Apart, has already shared a major Indian literary prize with one of the nation's modern masters, Amithav Ghosh. Neel Mukherjee joins Mariella to discuss the novel. He reveals his feelings about modern India, 17 years after he left the country, and his frustration with many depictions of the country by its own writers. A new yearly anthology brings together fiction writing from more than 30 European countries. The collection's editor, Aleksandar Hemon, talks about compiling the volume and what it reveals about the concerns of contemporary European writers. As a new Hollywood adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's novel A Single Man reaches our screens, the novelist Adam Mars-Jones and Katherine Bucknell, the editor of Isherwood's diaries, discuss the life and legacy of the writer.