I recently spoke with British journalist and author, John Lanchester, about his new novel, Look What You Made Me Do. I can’t say too much about the book for fear of spoiling any of the plot points. But what I can say is that it’s a psychological thriller, although Lanchester’s publishing team would rather call it a “black comedy about intergenerational resentment.” The novel oscillates between two points of view: Kate, a woman quite happy in her marriage to Jack, and Phoebe, the young woman behind a hit reality TV show titled “Cheaters.” This slow burn of a novel reveals how the lives of the two women are intertwined despite the fact that they’d never met.
John Lanchester is widely recognized for both fiction and nonfiction writing. His journalism has appeared in the London Review of Books, Granta, The Observer, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The New Yorker. His first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, received the Whitbread Book Award and his 2019 novel, The Wall, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I recently spoke with John Lanchester about Look What You Made Me Do, his sixth book.
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Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester was published by W.W. Norton & Company.
When Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, here’s what the judges had to say about it: “A gut-punch of a novel…Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit – and whether we could all do better.”
In this episode, book critic, Suzanne Perez, looks at this slim novel that offers an expansive moral message.
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson was published by Mariner Books.
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Editors: Lu Anne Stephens & Haley Crowson
Producer: Haley Crowson
Theme Music: Torin Andersen
Host: Beth Golay
