Everyone’s a critic in this month’s podcast. Alex Clark and Will Rycroft get tips from London’s booksellers on the hot titles to look out for this year as well as mentioning a few themselves including the new novel from Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time. Sarah Howe gives fascinating insight into her poetry collection, A Loop of Jade, fresh from winning the TS Eliot Prize. And D J Taylor discusses the literary landscape from Grub Street to Bloggers with plenty of opinion along the way. Download and immerse yourself in the world of books.

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Julian Barnes – The Noise of Time

In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.

Sarah Howe – Loop of Jade

There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots.

With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.

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