Novels first published in serial form
11 episodes
Episodes in this category also belong to the following categories:
Crime and Punishment
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dostoevsky's novel in which Raskolnikov is mediocre but thinks he's superior and his future more important than the lives of the women he kills
14 November 2019
Featuring: Sarah Huspith, Oliver Ready, Sarah Young
Eugene Onegin
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), often described as his masterpiece, which tells the tragic story of Onegin, Lensky and Tatyana.
22 June 2017
Featuring: Andrew Kahn, Emily Finer, Simon Dixon
Germinal
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emile Zola's thirteenth and most successful novel in his Rougon-Macquart series, in which a strike breaks out in a destitute French mining village.
26 October 2023
Featuring: Susan Harrow, Kate Griffiths, Edmund Birch
Heart of Darkness
Melvyn Bragg discusses Joseph Conrad's Novel, Heart of Darkness, a critique of colonialism at the turn of the century
15 February 2007
Featuring: Susan Jones, Robert Hampson, Laurence Davies
James Joyce's Ulysses
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss James Joyce's celebrated novel Ulysses.
14 June 2012
Featuring: Steven Connor, Jeri Johnson, Richard Brown
Madame Bovary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the literary sensation caused by the trial for indecency of Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary.
12 July 2007
Featuring: Andy Martin, Mary Orr, Robert Gildea
Middlemarch
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss George Eliot's Study of Provincial Life, set before the Reform Act 1832 in a small, fictional town in the Midlands surrounded by farmland.
18 April 2018
Featuring: Rosemary Ashton, Kathryn Hughes, John Bowen
North and South
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, who set her 1855 novel in a version of Manchester she called Milton in the county of Darkshire.
9 March 2017
Featuring: Sally Shuttleworth, Dinah Birch, Jenny Uglow
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, which challenged Victorian morality and made Hardy's fortune when published in the 1890s.
5 May 2016
Featuring: Dinah Birch, Francis O'Gorman, Jane Thomas
The Time Machine
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and anxieties in late Victorian London, explored by HG Wells in his story of time travel, evolution and a planet unfit for humans.
17 October 2019
Featuring: Simon Schaffer, Amanda Rees, Simon James
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', the bestselling American novel of the 19th century which has slavery as its central theme.
8 June 2006
Featuring: Celeste-Marie Bernier, Sarah Meer, Clive Webb