Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa

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 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

In this episode of the Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa, she passes the mic to members of our community, inviting them to ask Roxane Gay, author of Dua’s Monthly Read for March, Bad Feminist, the questions they’ve always wanted to know.  

Roxane talks about the writers who shaped her, how she protects her mental health when her work puts her in the crosshairs and why firm boundaries make honest writing possible. Perhaps most importantly, Roxane answers one of the weightier questions of our time: can literature ignite a revolution?  

Get in touch:       

📩 Email us – [email protected]       

📲 Follow @service95bookclub and @service95 on Instagram for updates       

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – 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

For the March edition of the Service95 Book Club’s Monthly Read, Dua Lipa sits down with one of the most prominent feminist voices of this generation, Roxane Gay, to discuss her widely celebrated book of essays, Bad Feminist. 

In this exclusive video, Roxane Gay reads an essay from the book, Peculiar Benefits. “It’s an essay I wrote when I was trying to think through my relationship to privilege. And how, at times, people are often reluctant to claim privilege, because they are marginalised in other areas of their life,”says Roxane.   

Plus, if you haven’t already, be sure to watch Dua and Roxane’s full conversation, which is available to watch now... 

Get in touch: 

📩 Email us – [email protected]      

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates      

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com 

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