Send us a text Sarah Hall needs little introduction. Twice nominated for the Man-Booker Prize and the first and only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice, she has written ten highly acclaimed novels and short story collections. This August she returns with her latest novel Helm, the multi-millennial tale of the strange and seductive wind which haunts the Eden Valley of her native Cumbria. The story is one that she has been unable to walk away from; a twenty year projec...

Send us a text Shortlisted for this years Orwell Fiction Prize, The Accidental Immigrants is a work of political fable for our times. Dedicated to ‘all the people who lose their lives trying to reach a safer shore,’ Jo Mcmillan’s latest novel centres on a desperate British couple who are displaced from their home on a fictional Mediterranean island by a rising totalitarian regime. Born from a disgust at the decade-long surge of European far right politics and the ineffective centrism that pav...

Send us a text On this episode we hear from Lally Macbeth about her incredible compendium ‘The Lost Folk.’ The distillation of a lifetime’s passion, it is an inclusive and comprehensive take on the meaning of folk, that asks us to rediscover, to cherish and to share the particular and the weird from which all our communities are made. From pub signs to tea towels, bonfires to storytellers, this is a book that holds the elusive, the unownable and the collective dear. The Lost Folk’s epig...

Send us a text Short story special: Two collections from two great independent presses. First up is Make A Home of Me by Vanessa Santos. Dead Ink Books bring us an exciting new voice in the horror landscape. Eight unsettling stories full of haunted children, impossible reappearances and unnatural forces desperate to be known. Definitely one for fans of Carmen Maria Machado or Matt Hill. Then we meet Eva Wyles to discuss DeliveryWoman, recently published by Influx Press. A stunning debut that ...

Send us a text Saraswati Published by Serpent's Tail It’s hard to talk about Gurnaik Johal’s debut novel without using the word epic. Saraswati is transcontinental, multi-generational and led by a broad cast of characters - if you’re a fan of fiction on the scale of a book like Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension, then Saraswati is for you. Beginning with the re-emergence of a supposedly mythical river, Saraswati follows the descendants of a lone couple Sejal and Jugaad, pursuing familial tri...

Send us a text On June 19th Wendy Erskine’s long awaited debut novel The Benefactors is published. Many of you will already know Wendy from her two acclaimed short story collections Sweet Home and Dance Move and you’ll find The Benefactors filled with the same deep curiosity for people, the same raw laughs and the same unsparing honesty. Set, once again, in her much loved Belfast it is a broad and embracing portrait of a community that moves from the sexual assault of one of its centra...

Send us a text On this episode Holly Dawson speaks to us about her debut All of Us Atoms. Faced with the prospect of losing her memory Holly set out to revisit the moments that had shaped her, from the earliest recollections of childhood to her diagnosis. What follows is the documenting of a ‘felt’ life. In a series of essays, letters and short stories she weaves together memory, dreams, and reality, grasping hold of the consolations of science and discovering a deep love for the forget...

Send us a text On this episode we meet Lucia Lijtmaer to hear all about her upcoming novel Cautery. Published for the first time in English by Charco Press, it is a novel filled with apocalyptic fantasies and a deep mistrust of the supposed greater good. Set between modern day Barcelona and puritan New York Cautery follows the stories of two women (one real, the other imagined) who, although separated by 400 years both share a vision of either escaping the confines of society or burning...

Send us a text ALL OF THIS UNREAL TIME Published by Rough Trade Books Hopefully, you're listening to this surrounded by mountains of chocolate. What follows is the second part of our conversation with Max. If you’ve enjoyed it, follow the link to get yourself a copy straight from the Rough Trade website. https://roughtradebooks.com/products/all-of-this-unreal-time-max-porter-foreword-by-cillian-murphy As our discussion about All Of This Unreal Time came to an en...

Send us a text ALL OF THIS UNREAL TIME Published by Rough Trade Back this weekend with a double header, we turn to All of This Unreal Time by Mr Max Porter. Described in the foreword as ‘a gift, written in friendship’ it is an elusive, ever moving torrent of apology, love and gratitude. A response to the countless human and non-human lives that intersect with and impact on our own. Written during the first, weird summer months of the pandemic, the piece blossomed ...

Send us a text On this episode we speak to Naomi Booth about her latest novel Raw Content. Set during a bleak Yorkshire winter, the book follows Grace, a legal editor whose job demands she reduce unspeakable acts to neatly worded clauses. The care and attention with which Grace approaches this work is only matched by her risk taking outside it. When she falls unexpectedly pregnant she attempts the same compartmentalisation, hoping to keep the new, visceral weirdness that her body is undergoin...

Send us a text On this episode, we speak to Anna Whitwham about Soft Tissue Damage, her startling account of a healing found in controlled violence. Published by Rough Trade Books on 27.03 it charts both the loss of Anna’s mother to cancer and her subsequent choice to battle unresolved anger in the boxing ring. From early sparing sessions to the draining seconds of the final round, Anna writes both with immediacy and unflinching honesty. What emerges is an exploration of the pain we choose, t...

Send us a text On this episode, Ben Markovitz talks to us about his latest novel The Rest of Our Lives. Starting in the midst of a failing relationship, the story follows Tom Layward, a man on the cusp of a life changing decision. Having lived for years in the shadow of a brief affair that his wife Amy pursued, Tom resolves to leave, following their own adult children out into the world. What follows is a road trip of wrong turns and misdirections, across a strangely dislocated and misremembe...

Send us a text On this episode Ellen E. Jones speaks to us about Screen Deep, How Film and TV can Solve Racism and Save the World. Many of you will know Ellen from Radio 4’s Screen Shot, in which, alongside her co-host Mark Kermode, she enters the various worlds of Doris Day, jobbing hitmen and the longest running video shop in the world. Screen Deep is written with the same insight, encyclopaedic knowledge and social consciousness that Ellen brings to her broadcasting. (She also does a...

Send us a text On this episode we speak to Adelle Stripe about her incredible memoir Base Notes. Published by White Rabbit and described perfectly by Wendy Erskine as ‘a marvel of specificity,’ it is everything you’d expect if you’ve read any of Adelle’s previous work. Open, kind and often very funny, it is a deeply humane book and one written with the clear economy of a poet. There are small town break outs, serendipitous strangers, sex line stints and New York hustle but there's no sp...

On this episode we meet novelist Omar El Akkad to discuss One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Published by Canongate (27.02 - UK) it is a powerful meditation on what it means to live in the heart of an empire, an indictment of Western complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and an exploration of the hypocrisies on which we build our lives. Drawing from Omar’s own journalistic experience reporting on years of the ‘War on Terror,’ and the migration of his childhood,...

We catch up with Elaine Garvey to discuss her wonderful debut novel The Wardrobe Department. Set in the early 2000s and written with a disarming first hand delivery, it is the story of Mairéad, a young Irish theatre professional who’s come to London in a bid to pursue a career backstage. Caught between an acute homesickness for the Ireland of her imagination and a gruelling work life, Mairéad is adrift and unable to make a home in either place. When an urgent call to return home comes she is ...

First published in Italian three years ago Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is brought to an English speaking readership for the first time by Fitzcarraldo who publish Sophie Hughes’ exceptional translation on February 13th.Taking inspiration from George Perec’s - Things, A Story of The Sixties, Perfection is the story of Anna and Tom, an Italian couple living a carefully curated life in Berlin as freelance graphic designers. The novel purposefully remains on the surface of their lives, ...

On this episode we speak to Orlando Reade about What in Me is Dark; his exploration of the radical life of Paradise Lost. Within it, the author considers the relationship between the poem and some of the writers and revolutionaries who have drawn inspiration from it over the centuries since its writing. From Mary Shelley to Malcolm X the influence of Milton’s epic is as far reaching as the poet hoped it to be, but in intriguingly contradictory ways. What in Me Is Dark is an accessible and dyn...

Another gem from the mighty Rough Trade Books on this episode. This time round we hear from the wonderful Jen Calleja on her latest book Goblinhood, a compelling patchwork of pop culture, family histories and poetics that sets out Jen’s theory of ‘goblin’ as a mode. What at first appears a dizzying and at times disparate array of references soon emerge as a map of behaviours; the false starts, foolish consistencies, safe spaces and new beginnings we all share. Part memoir, part reckonin...