At lunchtime on 9 June, I’ll be at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, for the anniversary of Dickens’s death, signing copies of Dickens and Travel. …
Gerald Dickens is a great great grandson of the author, Charles Dickens. He has been working as an actor, director and producer for many years. In 1993 he created his first one-man show, a theatrical performance of A Christmas Carol inspired by Charles’ own energetic readings of the 1860s. …
Amanda Craig is the author of nine novels, including her latest book, The Three Graces which is about 3 friends in their 80s, who have retired to Tuscany, where they must stop one grandchild from a disaster wedding, redeem another and save a life. …
The Tennis Champion Who Escaped The Nazis is a family memoir. Felice Hardy’s grandparents fled to London with their daughter, escaping from Nazi-occupied Vienna. This book explores their new lives in England, as well as the terrible fate of those loved ones they were forced to leave behind in the Holocaust. …
When Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway in 1925, it began a whole new literary movement. The novella was written in a fresh, immediate style that has become known as ‘stream of consciousness’. If you’ve not read Mrs Dalloway for years, or have never read Virginia Woolf before, June is the perfect month to read (or re-read) this beautifully crafted, slender volume – because the entire course of the book takes place on one summery June day in London. …
Recent Events
This week, it’s a double helping of Hawksleys on Goldster, as Lucinda interviews her co-presenter, Humphrey Hawksley, about his own life as an author and his critically acclaimed novels.
Humphrey is a journalist, and was, for many years, a foreign correspondent for the BBC. He now uses his finely honed journalistic research skills and in-depth knowledge of world politics to create a series of tense and compelling thrillers, featuring an iconic hero, Rake Ozenna. …
Victoria & Abdul is the story of the controversial relationship between Queen Victoria and a young Indian servant called Abdul Karim who arrived in court as a special present for her Golden Jubilee. Soon he became the Queen’s favourite, was promoted to being her Munshi or teacher, taught the Queen Urdu and introduced her to curries. Based on previously unseen journals and letters, Shrabani Basu uncovered this hidden story that rocked the establishment. …
Louise Minchin went from presenting BBC Breakfast to competing for the GB Team in Triathlon in the World and European Championship. In her new book Fearless she set out to push herself even further. Over 17 chapters, Louise embarked on terrifying, exhilarating adventures across the UK and the world to be able to tell extraordinary women’s stories – and to test herself. …
For May, our Book of the Month is The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce. The book was released a decade ago, when it garnered huge success, being nominated for the Man Booker Prize and winning a National Book Award. We’re reading it on Goldster this month to coincide with the release of a new film version of the novel, starring Penelope Wilton and Jim Broadbent. …
We have an unexpected Inside Story this Friday, after our planned author had to cancel their interview. Instead, to coincide with the new Tate Britain exhibition on ‘The Rossettis’, Goldster presenter Lucinda Hawksley will be talking about her very first biography, the story of the original supermodel, Lizzie Siddal …
It’s 1990. The Happy Mondays are in the charts, a fifteen-year-old called Kate Moss is on the cover of The Face magazine, and Julia Roberts wears thigh-boots for the poster of a new movie called Pretty Woman. February Kingdom is nineteen years old when she is knocked sideways by family tragedy. Then one evening in May, she finds an escaped canary in her kitchen and it sparks a glimmer of hope in her. …
Stu Hennigan is a writer, poet and musician from the north of England. His book Ghost Signs: poverty and the pandemic, grew almost accidentally out of his volunteering work of delivering food parcels during the covid lockdowns. He wrote down what he was witnessing, wanting his experiences to be known by a wider audience “because this is real life”. …
Barbara Black’s new book, Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories looks at Victorian London’s grand hotels as both an institution and a culture intimately connected to the urban landscape. London’s grand hotels provided an essential space for socializing, fashioned by concerns relating to class, gender, and nationality.Hotel London explores how the emergence of the grand hotel as a physical and metaphorical space helped to construct a consumer economy that underscored London’s internationalism and, by extension, England’s global status. …