Cassie McCullough

Or locale.

Kate, you remember me raving on about that Patrick Gale book a year or two ago and his level of detail and I was complaining about how, I don't know, they were arriving at some house in the countryside and we had everything described to us about the building and the extension and where the stairs had been placed and it was just too much, for God's sake.

Get on with it.

So true.

Okay.

So maybe nature in detail is something that I can also bear.

And Tom Stoppard being the playwright of

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead back from the late 60s right through to Arcadia which was you know I think it was in the 90s or something these great big plays really sort of beginning of a certain wave in theatre and I suppose theatre buffs will know exactly what it is I don't have a name for it but yeah a real humour and a kind of invitation into some of the bigger ideas that are around.

The American writer Don DeLillo has written 17 novels and won many awards.

He's also a playwright, a screenwriter and essayist.

He's one of those big names in writing.

Yeah, I've got a sense of guilt about Don DeLillo because someone gave me one of his books for Christmas once and it was so enormous I never read it and I've always felt a little bit bad about him when I think of his name.

Guilt, there you go, reading guilt.

So before we get to Tegan Bennett Daylight's take on this latest novel, Geordie, can you describe the late style of Don DeLillo?

So, yeah, is it just as simple as a blackout or is there something more sinister going on?

I guess when you're talking about it, I'm thinking of shades of 9-11 and the city disrupted, New York disrupted.

Is it something along those lines?

Yeah.

I love that question of the late work, though, when maybe as an artist, a writer, as a thinker, by the end of your life, you go into this final phase where you're also possibly contemplating the end, but also maybe free from a lot of the earthly concerns of life, children and, you know, whatnot.

And sometimes those works are almost...