Cassie McCullough

Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom is published by Viking.

On the bookshelf, we're talking new fiction, as always.

Today with academic Rahul Garola and also biographer Jacqueline Kent.

And the writer we're turning to now is Sue Miller, author of 11 novels, including The Good Mother and While I Was Gone, and the memoir The Story of My Father.

But, Kate, Jacqueline, it's her new novel, Monogamy, that you've read today.

That's right.

And the title, of course, is a bit of a giveaway, Jacqueline, but she could also have called it monogamy with a question mark, couldn't she?

And Anne Tyler being the American author who's most famous for The Accidental Tourist, but her most recent novel that came out this year is The Redhead by the Side of the Road, which we've discussed here on the bookshelf.

And so what she does in this novel, as you say, she sets up the relationship between this couple, Annie and Graham, but she's very good at giving potted histories of other characters who we meet.

We get their backstories.

We find out who Annie and Graham were before they met.

They'd both been married to other people, but they have quite different personal styles.

So how would you describe them personality-wise?

Yes and I would have been satisfied with it if it had just kept on doing that and we meet these really interesting backstories and characters and there's Graham's best friend both Graham and this man John have both lost their fathers so there's this whole sort of lost boy thing going on and that's at that point I thought I knew what this novel was doing

And then quite early on it changes.

What we're about to say is there on the cover of the book and it does happen very early on in the book.

Well, Jacqueline, I spoke to Sue Miller recently about what she wanted to do in the book after Graham's death.

And this is what she said.

And so how well did she write grief, do you think?

And I think partly the other thing that she's done that makes it work is that it's a story of a relationship, but it's not just about two people.