The Hatchards Podcast

On this episode, we’re joined by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead to discuss his latest novel, Cool Machine, the final entry in his epic crime series, The Harlem Trilogy. 
Charting four decades in the life of a furniture salesman who moonlights in the buying and selling of stolen goods, Whitehead draws inspiration from the stylised worlds of James Ellroy and Donald Westlake, but suffuses them with the New York social history of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. 
It’s also a masterclass in the history of 20th-century African American pop culture: we visit the set of a 1970s Blaxploitation film; hang out with the downtown art kids in the era of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the rise of street art; and gain insights into the lives and careers of black figures from the pre-Civil Rights era, like Jesse Owens, Lena Horne, and Sidney Poitier. 
Hosted by Ryan Edgington and Matt Hennessey. Produced by Lily Woods. Special thanks to Thuliswa Magwaza for production support.

On this episode, we’re joined by David Sedaris, one of the most celebrated modern essayists, to discuss his latest collection, The Land and Its People, which has been chosen as our Hatchards Nonfiction Book of the Month for July. 

It continues his decades long exploration of life's absurdities—both the comic and the painful—transforming them into essays about everything from generative AI, to having a priest's cassock tailor-made for him in Vatican City.

He also reflects on being a godparent, outliving old friends, and the unlikely path that took him from dead-end jobs and substance abuse to becoming one of America's best-loved comic voices.

Hosted by Ryan Edgington. Produced by Lily Woods.

On this episode, we're joined by author Kathryn Stockett to discuss her new novel, The Calamity Club, which follows a group of remarkable women as they confront the reactionary social, cultural, and economic forces that defined much of the American South during the Great Depression.

It has been 17 years since Stockett published The Help, one of the defining publishing successes of its era, and she shares with us the anxiety she felt returning to this world after writing a wildly successful, albeit controversial, literary phenomenon. She explains why, this time around, she attempted—and failed—to write a follow-up book that was less likely to become a cultural lightning rod.

For all of The Calamity Club's stifling Mississippi heat and small-town prejudice, the predominant feeling readers are left with is joy. That's because this sweeping story is leavened by the voices of two of the funniest and most fully realised characters you're likely to encounter in any book this year.

Hosted by Ryan Edgington. Produced by Lily Woods and Matt Hennessey.

On this episode, we are joined by Edward Chisholm, author of our Non-Fiction Book of the Month for May, Murder in Paris ’68. This gripping French crime saga uncovers a vast criminal conspiracy surrounding cinema icon Alain Delon, who was once accused of murdering his friend and bodyguard, Stevan Marković.

The so-called 'Marković Affair' entangled figures ranging from organised crime to President Georges Pompidou, and Chisholm draws on still-classified material and the defining films of the era to revisit a moment of glamour, corruption, and cultural change.

Hosted by Ryan Edgington. Produced by Lily Woods and Matthew Hennessey.

On this episode, we’re joined by the author of our Fiction Book of the Month for April, Jean-Noël Orengo, whose novel, intriguingly titled You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love, is an imagined portrait of the life and lies of Albert Speer, Hitler’s closest confidant and chosen architect for Nazi Germany.

Speer, who was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, successfully transformed his public image from that of a war criminal into that of the prototypical “Good Nazi,” becoming an international celebrity and one of the most prominent historical chroniclers of the Third Reich. Now, as we approach a time when almost no living witnesses remain, Orengo’s novel asks vital questions about who gets to write history and whether it can be relied upon.

Hosted by Ryan Edgington. Produced by Lily Woods.