Cassie McCullagh

We've also got Patrick De Witt's French Exit, which is funny and sharp and quite unexpected.

I'm Kate Evans.

Join us again next week.

I chose to raise a family.

For me, it was a privilege.

But for you, you may think it's old fashioned.

I know you're not what Nick needs.

Welcome to The Bookshelf, your weekly riff on reading.

I'm Kate Evans.

And I'm Cassie McCullough, and together we look for what's new, what's spiky, what's sparkling.

Not to mention what's worth revisiting and rereading.

Which is why we're rereading a book that was written in German in the mid-1930s

and released in English in 1942, where it was a bestseller, Anna Seeger's The Seventh Gate.

Arts journalist Martin Portis joins us to discuss that one.

Another German novel, a contemporary one, by renowned playwright Roland Schimmelfenig.

The book is called One Clear Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the 21st Century.

Literary specialist Helen Groth is our reader of that wolfish tale.

As if his surname wasn't long enough, he has to go and write a book with an impossibly long title.

And also a wealthy Chinese-Indonesian family that's rotten to the core in Tiffany Zhao's Under Your Wings, which begins with a mass poisoning at a birthday feast.

And that's just the start.