Today Book Club Announces Fifth Selection

On Friday, November 1, NBC News' Today Show announced that the fifth selection of its monthly "Today Book Club" is The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van, by Alan Bennett (Random House paperback). Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones's Diary, chose this month's selection. Both Bennett and Fielding were guests on the morning show.

Bennett's latest novel is actually two stories, both dealing with the nature of possessions. In "The Clothes They Stood Up In," a couple returns home to find their Regent's Park flat stripped bare (the robbers even took the toilet paper).

The second story, "The Lady in the Van," details the strange life of an eccentric Londoner, Miss Shepherd, who parks her overstuffed van, filled with a decade's worth of old clothes and other items, in the author's driveway for 15 years. The Village Voice called Bennett's biographic essay "one of the finest bursts of comic writing the twentieth century has produced."

For more on the Today Book Club, click here.