Joining John and Andy this week are novelist Marie Phillips (Gods Behaving Badly, Oh, I Do Like To Be...) and novelist, screenwriter and poet Joe Dunthorne (Submarine, O Positive). The book we are discussing is Gerard Reve's debut novel De Avonden AKA The Evenings, which caused a sensation when published in the Netherlands in 1947 and is now considered a classic. In the words of Herman Koch, it may be 'the funniest, most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written'. Reve was only 24; he went on to have a long, successful and frequently scandalous career but only a handful of his books have been translated into English. Also in this episode John digs Bella Bathurst's new book Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land and Andy surveys Landscapes of Detectorists and discovers prose to treasure.

Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)
10:26 - Landscapes of Detectorists by Innes M. Keighren & Joanna Northcup
16:29 - Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land by Bella Bathurst
22:07 - The Evenings by Gerard Reve

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