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DJ Taylor talks to Barry Unsworth, who shared the 1992 Booker Prize for his historical novel Sacred Hunger. Now Unsworth has completed a sequel, The Quality of Mercy, which revisits the eighteenth-century world of the slave trade. He discusses returning to the subject twenty years on, and explains how he was affected by the horrific conditions experienced by eighteenth-century coalminers.

The Indian-born novelist Anita Desai talks about her latest book The Artist of Disappearance, a trio of novellas, and explains why in her eighth decade she found herself exploring this new form. And the literary critic Peter Kemp traces the history of the novella, from Renaissance literature to Julian Barnes.

Producer: Thomas Morris.