John Lanchester

speaker

548 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 27 Jun

John Lanchester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · John Lanchester & Hattie Crisell: Look What You Made Me Do · 27 Jun 2026 podcast

And the thing that was inside the box with that book, it was about the rule of law.

And it was the thing I started after Capital.

And then I got, I've written more of it than any other book I've abandoned, wrote about 40,000 words of it.

And then I hit this thing where there was, and I'd had it plotted and planned, I knew what was gonna happen in the book, but I couldn't hear one of the characters.

There's a whole bunch of characters in it, and it's about the third or fourth in sequence who carries the story forward.

And I just couldn't hear her voice.

I couldn't tune the radio in.

I couldn't describe what was in her head.

And I still get frustrated about that and think I'd like to go back and finish that.

So I keep hoping that one day it will just pop in my head and I'll be able to carry on.

And then the rule of law seemed like a less interesting subject.

And then suddenly it seemed like an unbelievably interesting subject again.

But I hope that by the time this book's out, then it will just be clear which bale of straw, basically.

well i i um don't talk to anyone about what i'm writing when i'm writing it partly because i find it a it's easy to talk away and b i've i find this something incredibly helpful about miranda reads my book first um to have responses obviously doesn't doesn't know anything about it at all i call it a cold reading

Not a single tidbit of the book is known because you get a completely fresh response.

And I get that from Miranda, and then I get it from Alex, my editor.

And then people have all sorts of useful feedback, but there's something very, very helpful about that thing of response from someone who hasn't had the book described to them.

I find that really indispensable.

And the corollary or the cost of that is that

I don't have a kind of in process.

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