The Book Club: April 5

Next Sunday on The Book Club, Jennifer Byrne, Marieke Hardy and Jason Steger are joined by award-winning writer and slam poetry champion Maxine Beneba Clarke and ABC News 24’s Zoe Daniel (The World).

The panel will be discussing Roxane Gay’s debut novel An Untamed State – a story of privilege and poverty, race and gender, and ultimately of survival, all wrapped up in a page-turning thriller. It follows Mireille Jameson a middle-class Haitian woman who lives in America with her all-American, loving husband Michael and their infant son. Their fairy-tale existence is shattered when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight while visiting her family in Haiti. As her wealthy businessman father resists paying the ransom as a matter of principle, her ordeal stretches out into 13 torturous, hellish days in captivity, but the repercussions are felt for much longer.

The April Classic is Sally Morgan’s autobiography My Place. Chosen by Maxine, it has sold over 600,000 copies since its publication in 1987 and inclusion on various school curriculums. It’s a story of self discovery as West Australian writer Sally Morgan goes in search of her family story and along the way uncovers her indigenous heritage.

In a new segment on The Book Club, we invite our audience to send in their Video Comment or Question about this Classic for us to run on the show. We want you to start the conversation! Visit our website for details on how to upload your video, and get tips on how to shoot yourself on your smart phone or computer at: abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/ask

About the guests:

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer and slam poetry champion of Afro-Caribbean descent. Her short story collection Foreign Soil won the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and has since been shortlisted for the 2015 Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards for 2015.

Zoe Daniel is a former ABC foreign correspondent who was the African correspondent from 2005-2007 and then spent 2009 reporting on the Khmer Rouge war crimes trials in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. As the Southeast Asian Correspondent she was based in Bangkok where she lived with her family. She writes about life in the field as a mother of young children in her 2014 memoir Storyteller. She currently hosts ABC News 24’s The World.

6pm Sunday April 5 on ABC.