The Book Show

A fun wild ride here on the Book Show where Claire Nichols meets American Chinese writer Jenny Tinghui Zhang who has tapped into the K-Pop phenomenon with her latest novel Superfan. A knock-off American K-Pop group are set to make history, but at what cost to them and their loyal fans? It's an affectionate but covert satire on obsession, loneliness and fame.
And prepare for supreme silliness and a lot of blood letting when Shaun Micallef debates vampires, zombie slaves and a cast of dead historical figures. His new book De'ath Takes a Holiday is a unique perspective on the Gothic romance horror where the harbinger of Dracula attempts mortality.

For this Easter special an opportunity to revisit Yael van der Wouden the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction winner.
Her celebrated debut The Safekeep also made the 2024 Booker Prize shortlist. The Safekeep is set in the Netherlands, 15 years after the end of World War II and is about an uptight woman, an unpredictable house guest, loneliness, repression and desire. The novel confronts the prevailing narrative about the Dutch experience of World War II and its treatment of Jewish people.
Claire Nichols spoke to Yael at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2025
This conversation was first broadcast 23 June 2025

Australian author Debra Adelaide's latest book is her most personal to date. As she reveals to Claire Nichols, When I am 64 was written as an autofiction to give her more freedom to reflect on her lifelong close friendship as well as coming to terms with the death, at age 64, of writer Gabrielle Carey, most known as the co-author of Puberty Blues. 
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In her latest thriller The Shark, Emma Styles takes the reader to the height of a Perth summer. It's hot and as she tells Claire Nichols, a season sizzling with danger. But who is the Shark circling on the beach and how can two teenage girls net them?

Irish author Colm Tóibín shares with Claire Nichols the stories that have shaped his latest collection that travels continents and times. The News from Dublin is a glimpse into people living a life away from their homeland, from sisters wanting to return to Catalonia, the undocumented worker facing a decision, a mother receiving shocking news of the death of a son or the haunted Irishman seeking anonymity in Spain.
Using the noise and commentary around the death of a young woman, Afghan-born, Canadian based author Patmeena Sabit speaks with Claire Nichols on the ways she draws on her family roots and academic research to not just tell a story, but test assumptions around migrant communities. Good People is about a courageous Afghan family living the American dream, but cultural tensions, gossip, envy and conjecture swirl around following the death of their daughter.

This is Where the Serpent Lives from Pakistani-US writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, is an elegy to a changing Pakistan where contemporary life and technology jostles with feudal social hierarchy, privilege, corruption and ambition.
The protagonist in Australian writer Claire Thomas's latest novel On Not Climbing Mountains travels through grief on Swiss trains through the Alpine Way. It's a journey that inspires art, stories and captures moments of connection.