Writer and peacebuilding practitioner Dr Nussaibah Younis joins Tom’s Book Club to discuss her debut novel Fundamentally.

The novel follows Nadia, an academic who escapes a painful breakup by taking a UN job in Iraq, where she’s tasked with helping to deradicalise ISIS brides. Amid the bureaucratic absurdity of aid work, she forms an unexpected bond with Sara, a young British woman who joined ISIS at just fifteen — a relationship that begins to challenge Nadia’s assumptions, loyalties and sense of belonging.

In this extended conversation, Younis talks about drawing on her own experience working in Iraq and about the decision to adapt that material into fiction. She also reflects on humour, politics, and what novels can do that policy papers cannot.

Fundamentally comes out in paperback this week.

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Writer and foreign policy specialist Chloe Dalton joins Tom’s Book Club to talk about her debut book Raising Hare, a tender and unexpected story about caring for a wild leveret and the fragile bond between humans and nature.

In this conversation, Dalton reflects on finding a newborn hare alone in the countryside and the experience of raising it by hand. She discusses attention, responsibility, and what it means to coexist with the natural world, as well as how the book came to be written.

Raising Hare is Chloe Dalton’s debut and is out now in paperback.

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Booker Prize-winning novelist George Saunders joins Tom’s Book Club to talk about his new novel Vigil and his long-standing fascination with the space between life and death.

In this extended conversation, Saunders discusses writing Vigil, a novel that follows the final hours of KJ Boone, a powerful oil tycoon and architect of climate-change denial, as he’s visited by a series of ghosts. The conversation also touches on storytelling, the pressure that comes with success, and the role music has played in his writing life.

George Saunders is the author of Lincoln in the Bardo (winner of the Booker Prize), Tenth of December, and Liberation Day, and teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.

Vigil is out now in hardback.

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