Niall Williams’ Time of the Child might just be the big ‘feel-good book of the year’—but there’s more to it than that. This is a beautifully written Irish story, full of ordinary lives described in painfully funny detail. Also, Scottish writer Ali Smith and her too-real-to-be-allegorical Gliff; and in Alan Moore's The Great When, we're presented with a hallucinatory vision of an alternative London, anchored in post-World War ll realism. BOOKS Ali Smith, Gliff, Hamish Hamilton Alan Moore, The Great When, Bloomsbury Niall Williams, Time of the Child, Bloomsbury GUESTS Garth Nix, sci-fi and fantasy writer whose books include the Old Kingdom series, Angel Mage , and  The Left-Handed Booksellers of London; his latest is a middle-grade novel, We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord Chris Hammer, crime writer whose books include Scrublands, Silver, and The Tilt. His latest, featuring his characters Nell Buchanan and Ivan Lucic is The Valley  OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove Chris Whittaker, We Begin at the End C.S. Robertson, The Trials of Marjorie Crowe CREDITS Presenter: Kate Evans, Cassie McCullagh Producer, Kate Evans, Sarah Corbett Sound engineer, Craig Tilmouth, Ann-Marie Debettencor Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown