Knopf Doubleday Publishing

Whatever happens in the world, Bill Bryson demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

Bill Bryson is a master at using the isolated and mundane fact to tell imaginative and entertaining stories about the stuff of life. And he’s done it again in his latest work, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Bryson says, “the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.” Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture. Think about it – what story does your home tell?

Guest:

Bill Bryson, writer whose works include A Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Small Island, In a Sunburned Country, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, A Short History of Nearly Everything, which earned him the 2004 Aventis Prize, and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. He lives in England, where he is the Chancellor of Durham University