Richard & Judy are coming BACK to Channel 4 - with their Book Club
There’s good news and bad news for Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan.
After being sensationally dropped by digital channel Watch (because people weren’t) it seems their Book Club has been snapped up as a stand-alone programme by those nice people at Channel 4. Hurrah!
The only hitch, however, is that the husband and wife’s presenting skills will not be required when the series, made by Cactus TV, launches on More4.
My source reveals: “The Book Club was a very successful part of Richard and Judy’s C4 show. Sales of the books featured went through the roof.
“This time around it was felt that a new presenter or two would work better. There are some great names in the frame.”
Oh dear. Well, at least R& J will have time this summer to catch up with a spot of, erm, reading.
(from the Blood Lite anthology)
In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood. Anne Rice’s compulsively readable novel is arguably the most celebrated work of vampire fiction since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897. As the Washington Post said on its first publication, it is a ‘thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination …sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable’.
The tranquillity of a cruise along the Nile is shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway has been shot through the head. She was young, stylish and beautiful, a girl who had everything — until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalls an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: ‘I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.’ Yet in this exotic setting’ nothing is ever quite what it seems!
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, “The Name of the Rose” is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
Robert Neville is the last living man on earth … but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville’s blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive like this? One of the most influential “vampire” novels of the 20C. This book has been made into three movies - The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007)
Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human’s. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in all the city. Yet there is one odour he cannot capture. It is exquisite, magical: the scent of a young virgin. And to get it he must kill. And kill.
In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through, not in terms of battles and politicians, but by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. She did not live to see her ambition fulfilled, or to know that sixty-five years later, “Suite Francaise” would be published for the first time, and hailed as a masterpiece. Set during a year that begins with France’s fall to the Nazis in June 1940 and ends with Germany turning its attention to Russia, “Suite Francaise” falls into two parts. The first is a brilliant depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion and make their way through the chaos of France; the second follows the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation who find themselves thrown together in ways they never expected. Nemirovsky’s brilliance as a writer lay in her portrayal of people, and this is a novel that teems with wonderful characters, each more vivid than the next. Haughty aristocrats, bourgeois bankers and snobbish aesthetes rub shoulders with uncouth workers and bolshy farmers. Women variously resist or succumb to the charms of German soldiers. However, amidst the mess of defeat, and all the hypocrisy and compromise, there is hope. True nobility and love exist, but often in surprising places.
1939 - Nazi Germany - The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall. Some important information - this novel is narrated by death. It’s a small story, about: a girl; an accordionist; some fanatical Germans; a Jewish fist fighter; and quite a lot of thievery.
Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us …Nine-year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno’s friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process.
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