Book Talk

In this edition of Book Talk Scottish author Barry Hutchison and journalist and critic Chitra Ramaswamy join host Sasha de Buyl to talk about The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, the new novel by Irvine Welsh. Trainspotting may have been named as the nation’s favourite Scottish novel, but The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins is proving much more divisive, with our Twitter followers calling the novel everything from “brilliant” and “amazing” to “boring” and “utter rubbish”. The book follows the intertwined stories of Lucy Brennan, a personal trainer with her sights set on media stardom and Lena Sorensen, an overweight artist who accidentally catapults Lucy into the spotlight. Unusually for Welsh, the book features a female protagonist – how well has Welsh managed developing a female character? Listen now to discover what our panel thought about the book. Does the book achieve what it’s trying to say about the extremes of body imagine culture in modern American society? And can Irvine’s natural ability as a storyteller ma