Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa

From the archives this month, we bring you Dua’s conversation with Polish-German author Tomasz Jedrowski, author of Swimming In The Dark. 

 

Set in 1980, it’s a story of first love between Ludwig and Janus, told against the backdrop of communist Poland as the regime starts to crumble. 

 

This queer coming of age story explores a time and place where love, class and politics do not exist in isolation. The communist party looms large in this story, impacting both professional and personal relationships. 

 

Dua and Tomasz reflect on what might have been if their parents had not made the choices they did. Tomasz asks what life would have been like for a young gay man in Warsaw in his parents’ generation and Dua imagines growing up in Kosovo under the shadow of war. 

 

It’s an intimate and beautiful conversation that illuminates a turbulent period of recent history that many people today know little about.

 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com 

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In this episode of the Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa, we’re passing the mic back to you. Dua put your questions to Jez Butterworth about her April Monthly Read, Jerusalem – and here, he answers them. 

Jez traces the play’s origins back to New Year’s Eve 2000, explains how it came to find its name and goes inside his writing process: what tends to come first, which scene he found most difficult to write and the unique rituals that shape his writing. 

Watch (or listen to) the full conversation to go deeper into Jerusalem, Dua Lipa’s April read for the Service95 Book Club. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com 

And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts 
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For the April edition of the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa sits down with playwright Jez Butterworth to discuss his modern masterpiece, Jerusalem. If you’ve never read a play before, this is the place to start. 

With its raw, visceral portrait of myth, rebellion and a nation wrestling with its own identity, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest British plays of the 21st century. 

In this special video, Jez Butterworth reads a powerful excerpt from the play featuring Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron dispensing life advice to his young son Marky – a rare father-son moment filled with folklore and the wild inheritance of blood and belonging. “It was, at that point in 2009, the hardest thing I’d ever attempted to write… It was a massive challenge for me,” says Jez of the passage.  

Jerusalem blurs the line between truth and myth, capturing Rooster’s attempt to pass down something larger than himself; an inheritance of wildness, belonging and belief. 

If you haven’t already, be sure to catch Dua and Jez’s full interview, too, available to watch now here. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – ⁠[email protected]⁠ 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at ⁠service95.com⁠ 

And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts
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For April, Dua has chosen Service95’s first play: Jerusalem by award-winning British playwright Jez Butterworth. He’s widely regarded as one of the leading voices in contemporary theatre – with this conversation with Dua showing exactly what that reputation is built on. 

Here, Dua and Jez trace the creative forces behind Jerusalem, which unfolds across a single day in a fictional rural English village and centres on the anarchic Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron as he resists eviction from the woodland clearing he calls home.  

The conversation begins with the real figures and encounters that shaped the play’s characters, before turning to Jez’s instinctive approach to writing and the ideas that underpin Jerusalem. Together, they consider the play’s elusive staying power; as Jez puts it, it lingers like “a great song that you can never work out the meaning of”. 

Jerusalem is an exploration of belonging: who is permitted to remain, and who is forced out. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com 

And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts 
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From the archives this month, we bring you Dua’s conversation with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on her multi award-winning novel Half Of A Yellow Sun from August 2023.  

Dua says: “The story takes place in 1960s Nigeria, both before and during the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War. If this is a period of history you are not familiar with, don’t worry, you are not alone. Chimamanda skilfully balances truth and fiction, giving a gripping sense of what was at stake for those who lived through the war and granting this travesty the attention it deserves.” 

Together, Dua and Chimamanda explore the cast of characters, delving into themes of class, colonialism, politics and conflict. They also discuss how the novel’s parallel love stories – between Olanna and Odenigbo, and Kainene and Richard – remind us that love, jealousy, infidelity and forgiveness are as present in war as they are in peace. 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com 

And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices