Vintage Summer Podcast: two-part special

In the first half, Alex Clark meets author Brian van Reet, author of intriguing new book Spoils, set in 2003 Iraq. They discuss demonising the enemy, writing the other and what being patriotic really is. 

Then we talk The Idiot with author Elif Batuman - a beautiful and sharp coming-of-age story about the absurdities of academia and adolescence. Finally, Laurent Binet, bestselling author of HHhH, visits us the day after the French Presidential debates to discuss Roland Barthes, structuralism and his new literary conspiracy thriller, The 7th Function of Language.

In the second half Alex Clark talks to Neel Mukherjee about his experimental novel A State of Freedom, a book exploring what happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better. 

We meet Ruth Fitzmaurice - who, since publication, has been all over the British and Irish press with her memoir I Found My Tribe, a book about wild swimming and finding redemption in the freezing waves of the Irish sea. 

Lastly, Adam Thorpe gives us a look in to the process behind writing Missing Fay, a book that follows what happens when restless fourteen-year-old Fay goes missing from a Lincoln council estate. 

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