reporter: "la belle sauvage" might be set in an alternative reality, but the themes and conflicts played out in is 500 plus pages reveal an author deeply concerned with and connected to the here and now. bbc news. jane: i am jane o'brien. thanks for watching. with the bbc news app, our vertical videos are designed to work around your lifestyle, so you can swipe your way through the news of the day and stay up to date with the latest headlines you can trust. download now from selected app stores. >> funding of this presentation is made possible by -- the freeman foundation, kovler foundation, pursuing solutions for america's neglected needs. and fox searchlight. >> mom says you are writing a book to stop people going to war. i would really like if you write a book for me. >> have you come to see my woods? >> i'm going to call my bear winnie. >> you should call him pooh. if he ignores you, you can pretend you were just saying "pooh." >> pooh! why does everyone like winnie the pooh so much? >> after the war there was so much sadness. then winnie the pooh came along and happiness came out. >

. >> the focus on this book, in "labelle sauvage," the first part of "the book dust," are the eyes throughch we see the story, a boy called million com, 11 years old, and he's the son of an innkeeper called the trout on the edge of the river thames. and his view of the city is not like lyra's view. lyra's view as we saw it in "his dark materials" is a scholarly place, full of ancient rituals and libraries and books and learning and so on. malcolm's is different from that. he sees it from the perspective of someone who works on the river. he knows the river and the canals very well. oxford is laced through and through with streams and canals and tributaries. it's a very watery place, and malcolm sees it from this point of view and he sees different kinds of things in oxford from the things we saw in "his dark materials." >> it's obviously very inspiring for you. but you also once said "i am religious. i'm an atheist." aren't those two in conflict? what do you mean by that? >> i think what i meant by saying that was the questions that religion asks, questions like why are we here, why does t

they all take place in a fictional town called bois sauvage in mississippi where jesmyn ward lives andre her family is from. it's a bit timely and sort of post-katrina novels. this is about the people who are left behind and the people who stayed behind and why and what they're lives are like. it's about race. it's about class. she has been compared to william faulkner, toni morrison and herman melville in the reviews of this latest book. and while i think she is her own voice. those aren't terrible people to be compare with. >> reporter: no, they're certainly are not. pamela, let me give you one more: any category you want. >> all right. well this is, this is about fiction, but its nonfiction and that is bruce handy's book "wild things," which is about the joys of reading children's books as an adult. and i am a huge fan of children's books. and i do think that you read them in a different way as a child, and then if you read them in a different way with your children. and then if you read them on your own, you also see in them different things. and i think one of the things that he m

miles, doctors jean-pierre sauvage, fraser stoddart, and bernard feringa for the design and synthesis of molecular machines help how small are we talking? >> think of a nanometer. a nanometer is-- well, there are 80,000 of them in a human hair. that will give you an idea. we're talking very small. imagine machines at the molecular level that can do work, and some of the applications that we're thinking about are potentially drug delivery inside our system, and many others where tiny machines can pack a punch. another application they're looking at potentially, hari, is creating computer storage capability at the atomic level. well, if you're storing things at the atomic level you basically need a processor at the molecular model. nanomachines are potentially revolutionary. we're still very early on in that game. >> sreenivasan: how do you build something that small? >> it's basically a chemical process that you engage with, and that is part of their insight. and, you know, basically, the researchers are saying that we're kind of like the wright brothers at this point. we built a flyin