In this episode, I have a conversation with South African writer Barbara Adair about the book Crooked Seeds from Karen Jennings. This book is published by Karavan Press in 2024. I share with you how I know Barbara and how we decided we were going to have a conversation about this book. Karen Jennings was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2021 for her book An Island. Barbara shares with us the story of how she knows about this writer and why she wanted to have a conversation with me about this story. Crooked Seeds is about a woman who is stuck, and as I just had read Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (he won the Booker Prize in 2023 with this book), I hesitated to talk about another book that has a main character who is stuck. And yes, this book is hard to read if you look at the story and characters as if they are real people. Yet in our conversation, Barbara explains a different way of reading this story which helped me understand the story in another way. I am from the Netherlands and I have sometimes specific ways of reading, looking at books and stories, and in this conversation I mention a few of those. For example, my starting point is often to look at the story from the perspective I learned from a Dutch author I read many years ago. This author is Jos VandeLoo. I translated and shared his view on literature as follows: "Literature must make people think. The people have to become participants of the story, they have to take a side, make a judgement call. They have to do something!"