Take Four Books presents Open, Heaven, the debut novel from Seán Hewitt - an award-winning poet renowned for his critically acclaimed 2022 memoir of heartbreak and queer identity, All Down Darkness Wide.

Open, Heaven is a tale of suppressed adolescent desire set in the pastoral surroundings of rural northern England. In this episode, Seán reflects on three literary influences that shaped his novel: The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley, Maurice by E. M. Forster, and The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien.

The supporting contributor is author and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton, Dr Bea Hitchman.

There is also an extract from The Go-Between audiobook, narrated by Sean Barrett and published by Naxos AudioBooks.

Producer: Rachael O’Neill Editor: Gillian Wheelan This was a BBC Audio Scotland production.

In this episode of Take Four Books James Crawford is joined by the multi-award winning  Vietnamese-American poet and author, Ocean Vuong. Together with the writer and editor Heather Parry, they discuss Ocean’s latest novel - ‘The Emperor of Gladness’ - and three key influences behind its creation.

Set in the fictional town of East Gladness Connecticut in the early years of the 21st century, the ‘Emperor of Gladness’ is centred on nineteen-year-old Hai, and the unlikely bond he forms with with Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia. This vivid, poetic epic explore loss, hope, class and the power of human connection in the post-industrial opioid infused margins of the American Dream.

Ocean’s literary influences include, 'The Brothers Karamazov'by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 'The Town and the City' by Jack Kerouac, and 'Class Fictions' by Pamela Fox.

Producer: Elizabeth Ann Duffy Editor: Gillian Wheelan

This was a BBC Audio Scotland production, made in Glasgow.

Booker-prize winning writer and poet Ben Okri talks to Take Four Books, presented by James Crawford, about his new novella - Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted - and its three key influences. Ben's new book takes us to a forested chateau in the South of France for a special, one-night-only event – a fevered fancy dress ball attended by anyone, and everyone, who has been wounded by love. His three literary influences for this episode are: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot from 1922 ; Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare from 1600; and The Outsider by Albert Camus from 1942. Our rule-breaking bonus book, was Alain-Fournier’s Les Grand Meaulnes, known as The Lost Estate in English and originally published in 1913.

The supporting contributor for this episode was the Oxford academic and writer Emma Smith.

Producer: Dominic Howell Editor: Gillian Wheelan

This was a BBC Audio Scotland production.