With the Man Booker prize due to announce a shortlist next week, we catch up with one of the runners and riders: the Malaysian novelist Tash Aw. He tells us how he couldn't resist the pull of China, and how his latest novel, Five Star Billionaire, came under the spell of Shanghai.
Alongside Aw on the Booker longlist were writers whose novels weren't yet published. We run our eye over Richard House's The Kills, Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries and the best of this autumn's fiction.
One of fiction's big hitters, Jonathan Coe, joins us in the studio to talk about his latest exploration of Britishness, Expo 58. He explains why he has abandoned the satire of What a Carve-up! for a lighter form of comedy.
Reading list
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe (Viking)
