The Book Café - 17/05/2010

Summer Reads- as holiday season approaches we send River City's Libby McArthur book shopping on our behalf with the challenge to bring us back a good selection of enticing holiday reading. What would be the allure of surrendering yourself to a religious cult? Lesley Glaister draws on her own and her family's experiences of being attracted to extreme religious organisations in her new novel, Chosen. One of the joys of being a novelist is the total freedom to create people and places, as well as a plot. So why would a writer choose to give up the wide open spaces of fantasy and set their novel in a real place? Crime writer Ann Cleeves lived and worked on Fair Isle during the 1970s. Home to only seventy people, it's a place where everyone really does know everyone else. We accompany Ann as she heads back for the launch of Blue Lightening - and tries to discourage the islanders from 'spotting' their friends and neighbours in the story of a killer at large in this isolated community. The possibility of widespread closures is worrying many library users in the Highlands. We untangle the issues and find out exactly what the libraries mean to communities in the north of Scotland.