Tasting Life Twice is a collection of twenty-six interviews conducted by Ramona Koval over the past ten years at literary festivals, on radio programmes and in the homes of such writers as Les Murray, Morris West and Joseph Heller. Any randomly selected shortlist of these writers would impress: among them are Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and P.D. James, and some who have recently passed away: Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Malcolm Bradbury. Koval, of Radio National’s Books and Writing, is passionate about books and ideas, informing us in the introduction that her interviews revolve around ‘questions of how one evaluates a life, the getting of wisdom, facing death, the meaning of love, and whether a book ever changed the course of history’.