Cassie McCullough

Yes, another epic in his Pillars of the Earth series.

I read it pretty much, well, one weekend.

All 10,000 pages of it.

I don't know why they go down so easily, but they do.

And also Edmund White's A Saint from Texas.

Join us next time.

Thank you, Raymond E. Feist.

And he's just one of the fantasy writers who we'll be hearing from throughout today's discussion here on Radio National's Book Club.

Hello and welcome to a world of fantasy and wonder, monsters and aliens, imagination and

and possibility or gritty cities that whisper and see that you.

Hi, I'm Kate Evans.

Lev Grossman, Christopher Paolini, Maria Lewis, Garth Nix, Amy Kaufman, and if I've forgotten any others, well, we'll hear them as the show goes on.

And that's urban fantasy, and we'll be discussing it with the help of our guests, who are the academic and storyteller Denise Chapman and the novelist and critic Chris Flynn.

But while they're adjusting their seatbelts and getting ready for takeoff, let's hear from one of our listeners.

So Annie, for example, said, I just have to say that this is a strange book that I'm not understanding at all.

And then a week or so later, she came back to say, I've persevered and I'm totally getting into it now.

And we'll explain the premise and why people might be bamboozled in just a minute.

But let's get some visceral responses from our guests first.

Denise Chapman, storyteller and autoethnographer from Monash University.

What are your big picture responses to this book, Denise?