Date : 9th Jan
Guest: Paul Seaton. Author of 'cATS DONT EAT PANCAKES' and 'LIFE IS AN 8-BALL'. For more info about Paul, visit http://www.paulseaton.net/

Books

Life is an 8-Ball - Paul Seaton
Life Is An 8-Ball is a novel about love, time, but most importantly, friendship. The story centres on David, who in 2006 is at a crossroads. Turning thirty, his life is in need of change. David’s best friend Phil and his unloving wife Fiona join him on the last day of the year, which is also his birthday.  As David wishes he could alter his life, they toast a New Year that will never come...

David wakes up the next day aged fourteen, back in his parents’ house in 1991 – just a few weeks before his father was killed in a burglary. Can David save his father’s life and prevent the future from happening? Convincing Phil of what has happened may take a while...and time is running out.

Witty, imaginative and impossible to put down, Life Is An 8-Ball is an inventive story with bold characters and a storyline that will keep you hooked until the last page.

Thin He Was and Filthy-Haired - Robert Llewellyn
Centuries ago,in 1972,when flares were hip,"Layla" was in the charts for the first time and everyone had long hair, a thin, sly youth with an art O level and anarchic dreams went to live in an Oxford commune. Although his career was embryonic, he became known as Rob the cartoonist. Life was a round of parties, illegal substances and world-changing ideas. But before long, Rob's geodesic dome leaked rain, his dog fell pregnant, and his girlfriend fled to New Mexico. Real life began to intervene.

Some time around 1973, the party ended--abruptly and humiliatingly--in a police station in Newbury. Reserving his right to remain silent,young Robert decided to save his excuses for a future generation. Now it's time to come clean. "Thin He Was and Filthy-Haired" is his remarkable (teenage) life story. And it's funnier than you'd ever believe.

The Star's Tennis Balls - Stephen Fry
For Ned, 1978 seems a blissful year. Handsome, popular, responsible, and a fine cricketer, life if progressing smoothly, if not effortlessly. When he meets Partia Fendeman his personal jigsaw appears complete. What if her left-wing parent despise his Tory MP father? Doesn't that just make them star- crossed lovers? And surely, in the end, won't the Fendemans be won over by their happiness? But of course, one person's happiness is another's jealous spite. And spite is about to change Ned's life forever. A promise made to a dying teacher and a vile trick played by fellow pupils rocket Ned from cricket captain to solitary confinement, from Head Boy to political prisoner. More than twenty years later, Ned returns to London, a very different man from the boy seized outside a Knights bridge language college. A man implacably focused on revenge, revenge is a dish he plans to savour and serve to those who conspired against him, and those who forgot him.

SilverFin: A James Bond Adventure - Young Bond - Charlie Higson
How does an ordinary boy become the world's most famous secret agent? Discover how the legend began in Silverfin, the first in a series for younger readers about the young James Bond, a 13-year-old growing up in Britain in the 1930's.

Larry's Party - carol Shields
The Orange Prize-winning novel of Larry Weller, a man who discovers the passion of his life in the ordered  riotousness of Hampton Court's Maze. Larry and his naive young wife, Dorrie, spend their honeymoon in England. At Hampton Court Larry discovers a new passion. Perhaps his ever-growing obsession with mazes may help him find a way through the bewilderment deepening about him as -- through twenty years and two failed marriages -- he endeavours to understand his own needs. And those of friends, parents, lovers, a growing son. In LARRY'S PARTY Carol Shields presents an ironic odyssey through the life of modern man, from the late seventies through to 1997. The mundane is made magnificent by a perception which finds the drama in life's detail -- poignant, peculiar, or simply absurd.