Donal Ryan, Libraries in Fiction, Campus Novels

Available for over a year

Sathnam Sanghera talks to the Irish writer Donal Ryan about Strange Flowers. Set in 1973, it tells the story of twenty-year-old Moll Gladney who takes a morning bus from her rural home and disappears. After five long years she returns home with an estranged husband and son from a very different life. A portrait of familial love, Donal Ryan talks about his own loss and how it shaped the heart of the novel. As September always means a new term, Sathnam reflects on the state of the campus novel with author of The Truants, Kate Weinberg, and Brandon Taylor, long listed for this year's Booker Prize for his campus novel Real Life. And as libraries are often the place where many of us first fall in love with books, it's of no surprise that they feature heavily in the books we love. Author of The Midnight Library, Matt Haig, shares with us his favourite libraries in fiction.