This month World Book Club visits Paris, France to be guests of the iconic bookshop on the Left Bank of the River Seine, Shakespeare & Co. There Harriett Gilbert and a bookshop audience talk to acclaimed French writer Marie Darrieussecq about her extraordinary novel Pig Tales. Pig Tales is the story of a young woman who works at a shady Parisian massage parlour, becoming a favourite with her lustful clients until, that is, she slowly and alarmingly metamorphoses into a pig. A dark feminist fable of political and sexual corruption, and a grim warning of what can happen in a society without a soul, Pig Tales scandalised its readers when it first came out and became the most popular first novel published in decades. (Picture: Marie Darrieussecq. Photo credit: Charles Freger.)
Welcome to the World Book Club podcast.
I'm Harriet Gilbert and this month we're in France.
To be exact, we're in the legendary Shakespeare & Co.
Bookshop in Paris to talk about a most extraordinary, daring and original novel called Pigtails.
And here with us to answer questions about it from an invited audience and BBC listeners around the world, is its award winning author, Marie Dariusek.
Marie, welcome to World Book Club.
This bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, it's been here, I think, since 1951.
In this particular location.
It's a great bookshop.
You're familiar with it?
Yes, very much, yes.
You come here to buy books?
I do, I do.
I buy books here.
In English?
Yes.
Excellent.
And there's Notre Dame.
And you know what happened to Notre Dame?
We can see Notre Dame through the windows.