Shelf Life
Shelf Life is a show about books and the people who love them. In each episode, we invite a celebrated bibliophile (think Alan Cumming, John Waters, and Joyce Maynard) to select two of their favorite books, and then we chat about them, drawing connections between their lit choices and their lives and careers.
Shelf Life
Christopher Bollen on Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, and the abiding pleasures of the whodunnit
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Grand Journal
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Season 2
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Episode 22
Novelist Christopher Bollen has been writing twisty thrillers with emotional depth for over a decade. His latest, The Lost Americans, takes readers to Cairo for a deftly-plotted murder mystery set in the high-stakes world of arms traders and Egypt's authoritarian government. As with his writing, so with his book choices: we get intrigue and suspense in London during the Blitz, courtesy of Graham Greene’s 1943 espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear, and a criminal mastermind in Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit, an early novel that helped establish the reputation of the Queen of Crime.