In this week's books podcast, we turn to the subject that's been at the forefront of everyone's minds this year: money. In the week of the chancellor's autumn statement and governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King's gloomy forecast about what the financial future holds we take a look at how literature deals with capital.
Justin Cartwright, author of Other People's Money, and Alex Preston, sometime trader and author of This Bleeding City, a novel which captures the events of the 2007 crash from inside the financial sector, join us in the studio to talk about financial novels past and present, from Dickens and Trollope through to Tom Wolfe and Sebastian Faulks.
We also hear from Barry Unsworth, whose sequel to his Booker-winning Sacred Hunger, The Quality of Mercy, charts the moment in the 18th century when western capitalism as we know it was coming into focus. Performance poet Pete the Temp, who has been busy creating verse to accompany the Occupy movement, also contributes.
