Undocumented Online Event Video
Kamila Shamsie speaks to authors Nikita Lalwani and Abi Daré about their stunning new novels, telling the stories we never hear about the people we never see.
Lalwani’s, You People, is set in a London pizzeria staffed by illegal Sri Lankan immigrants and presided over by the mysterious Tuli, a resident Robin Hood, who promises to help anyone in need.
Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice is the story of Adunni, a young Nigerian woman sold into domestic servitude but determined to find her voice.
Asking difficult moral questions, these novels cast their light on the people who live in the shadows: the asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, the enslaved, the disenfranchised and the undocumented, who silently and thanklessly underpin economies and maintain lifestyles from London to Lagos and everywhere in between.
Agnes Poirier: Left Bank Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940
In conversation with Michael Goldfarb, Agnès Poirier paints a captivating portrait of those who lived, loved, fought, played and flourished in Paris between 1940 and 1950 and whose intellectual and artistic output still influences us today.
Read more: Agnes Poirier: Left Bank Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940
On 7 May we were joined virtually by Polly Paulusma who presented a taster of her latest album, Invisible Music, which celebrates musicality in the prose of Angela Carter, one of the twentieth century’s finest novelists and a former member of The London Library.
On what would have been Carter’s 80th birthday, Paulusma illustrated how Carter – herself a folk singer during the 1960s folk revival - absorbed the themes, images and rhythms of folk song into her remarkable prose. We were also joined by singer songwriter Kathryn Williams and author Kirsty Logan who performed readings of Carter's work.
Watch this exciting event below.
Read more: Angela Carter's Folk Song Influences with Polly Paulusma Event Video
For the latest in our podcast series, recorded just before the Library building closed, we are delighted to welcome musician, broadcaster and editor Jarvis Cocker.
Jarvis’s music career has spanned three decades, including major hits with the band Pulp, which he founded while still at school. A regular radio presenter he has also been involved in recent years with publishing house Faber & Faber and books and reading have always been part of Jarvis’s life.
For his podcast, Jarvis introduced five books that that have been particularly influential to him:
The first is Grimm’s Household Tales. For Jarvis there was something particularly appealing about the way the tales were collected rather than written from scratch.
In complete contrast is Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout, a chance find picked up in a secondhand book shop.
Jarvis’ next choice The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, made an equal impression as characters imagine their lives away from the drab world they inhabit, and find ways to relate and pour out their feelings.
Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari “haunted me for quite a time”. Jarvis had chosen it on holiday “but it isn’t beach reading and it actually really frightened me”.
Jarvis’s final podcast choice is The Book of the Secrets by Bagwhan Shree Rajneesh. He had been fascinated by the lurid Netflix documentary The Wild, Wild Country - about the movement creating a lavish settlement in Oregon. But he was more intrigued about the unanswered question of why the movement was so popular and what it had to say about approaching the mental overstimulation of 21st century life.
During his podcast, Jarvis reflected on a visit he made to The London Library recently and comments on how discovery, chance finds and serendipity have always informed Jarvis’ reading and helped fire his imagination. His podcast gives a fascinating and highly absorbing insight into some of the books he has found along the way.
