A fascinating discussion about modern India and the differences between first, second and third generation British Indians emerged from Meera Syal's entertaining and thought-provoking reading from The House of the Hidden Mothers, her first novel for 16 years. Based on the story of a 48-year-old Londoner who is desperate for a child and considers hiring a surrogate mother from her native India to have it for her, a nest of vipers converged benignly around the very contemporary issues of female ageing, loss of fertility, cultural and genetic connections, and medical ethics. Where exactly does a post-menopausal woman's burning desire to have a child stem from? What should be the cut-off point?

It transpires that India's surrogacy industry is the largest in the world, worth some $4.5bn, yet it remains largely unregulated with the result that the poorest women who have nothing but their fertility to sell are exploited by wealthy Western women (not for nothing does Syal open her novel with a quote from Margaret Attwood's seminal Handmaid's Tale).

Surrogacy thus becomes a metaphor for the ownership of motherland. As third-generation British Indians choose to return to the land of their forebears, and corruption and sexual violence are the biggest issues for its newly politically-engaged youth, old India is undergoing a massive regeneration. The motherland is, it seems, fighting back.

It was the death of her own beloved mother, a gifted translator of Arabic into German, that motivated Jenny Erpenbeck's profoundly thoughtful The End of Days. Grieving, she realised there was "no solution to death" and that writing about it helped. Rather than relate one woman's life chronologically (which would be "boring"), she chose instead to write a life story of a woman who dies and returns to life several times in order to "give the reader a sense of how many possibilities are contained in one human being". Her unnamed protagonist experiences the rise of antisemitism in Vienna, flees Nazism, becomes a communist in Moscow, and as a 90 year old sees the Berlin Wall fall. The book opens with the burial of a child, and the author ponders what would have happened had she kept on living. "Would she have been my mum if she'd died before I was born?" she said, her soft East Berlin accent holding her audience spellbound.

Her interviewer, the novelist Michel Faber, explained that when The End of Days was first published in 2014 he couldn't read it because he was off fiction altogether as he was grieving for his wife, who had recently died, and "didn't see the point of novels". Then he read the first few lines - "The Lord gave and the Lord took away, but that wasn't right because the Lord had taken away much more than was there to begin with" - and said he knew then that this book was going to speak to him. It was a sombre session that at times was difficult to bear, but it was also an extremely uplifting insight into the life-changing events of 20th century Europe.

Difficult questions around the issues of patriotism and anti-immigration were dealt with eloquently and honestly by the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad, whose remarkable book One of Us examines the upbringing of the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who in 2011 killed eight people by bombing government building in Oslo and went on to shoot dead 69 members of the Workers' Youth League summer camp on the island of Utøya. Horrific though the act was, Seierstad believes it is too early to tell if Norway has been fundamentally changed by it. Asked if the Far Right Breivik was acting against the country's immigration policy, she replied that Muslims make up only 3% of the Norwegian population and are well integrated; Breivik's real hatred, she said, was against his own country. In her experience violent criminals generally have had bad childhoods. Eight days before she died of cancer, Breivik's mother finally granted the author an interview in which she said she forgave her son. Not for the crime itself, but for what she believed was his act of revenge upon her - the mother who had never given him enough attention.