Backlisted - Summer Reading 2023 - Rerun

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Over here in the UK, we are well and truly into summer: some of us have World Cup fever, and others... have not. To celebrate the continuing balm, we are rerunning one of our classic summer reading episodes from 2023, where John, Andy and Nicky choose six books, old and new: O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker; Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale; The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time by Catherine Taylor; Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry; A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; and The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On July 16th, the Hawk lands on Netflix. From the mind of Will Ferrell. Oh, mama. I'm back. Come in love. Comes a new original series. Get ready. Get ready.

That's it. Did I stutter? When an iconic pro golfer. Lonnie? Hockey! Takes one last swing at greatness. You were a big shot golfer. I still am a big shot golfer.

No one. Dad, I'm the Hawk now. We'll stand in his way. That's how it's done. The Hawk, only on Netflix, July 16th. Hello, it's John. Hi, it's Nicky. We're here again for another backlisted rerun.

And this time, we're not going back quite so far in time this time. Only three years back to the summer of 2023 for our summer reading special. I think it was one of the summer reading specials where we scored a kind of number of winners. Andy talked about Celia Dale, Sheep's Clothing, her last novel. and all of those books are now being republished by Dorns. And of course famously, Nikki, you discovered the great Elspeth Barker novel, didn't you? I really, really enjoyed O'Calladonia, which turned out to be a book that you all won. Oh, yeah, I read that loads before.

But no, it is an incredible book and a perfect summer accompaniment for a wet Scottish holiday. That's right. Andy also talked about Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry And I remember he had this great kind of riff on Sebastian Barry All Sebastian Barry's novels taking place in this strange Same kind of place, time country, not just Ireland But a sort of an imaginative space where they all take place which was good And you also talked about Ayobami Edibiyos

A Spell of Good Things, Nigerian novelist Yeah, and then you went on a... interviewed her, didn't you afterwards? I did. I talked about her, I interviewed her on stage at Hay. And I talked about Catherine Taylor's memoir, The Stirrings, which I loved. She was born in New Zealand and then grew up in Sheffield. So it's an interesting sort of biblio memoir, someone who's a critic and a publisher and still a great, I think, doer of good things on the literary scene. But the book is really lovely. It's got this strange, backdrop because she grew up in Sheffield to the Ripper, the Peter Sutcliffe, Yorkshire Ripper case as well. So it's all kinds of interesting things flowing together. And then we end up on a fairly joyous note. I chose the KLF with the great subtitle, Chaos, Magic and the band who burned a million pounds.

All those books still really stand up, don't they? Yeah. If you're looking for a book this summer to read, like these are all really good recommendations. and have a listen. And I'm going to just peel back the curtain behind the scenes for a second to tell you that our summer reading episodes are on most popular episodes. They are. People really like them.

Well, also, I mean, despite Andy in his, you know, eorish way, always pouring, as it were, kind of cold water on the barbecue, I think even he says, these are the kind of beach reads that I would choose. just a really good selection of books. Yeah, the reason we're repeating the summer reading episode from 2023 is that actually we are going to do a brand new summer reading episode for 2026. So we're sort of putting the repeats away this summer.

We'll do one probably in a fortnight sometime before your summer holidays. You'll have a brand new summer reading 2026. So hopefully this is a little tease. They'll be back to back. Recommendations for your beach, your wet Scottish holiday, or you're lying in a dark room, however you choose to spend your summer. It'll be fun. We always enjoy doing them, don't we? It's the plan this year. We're going to pick a, we're each going to pick a contemporary book

and an old book as well. That's the idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, so just another quick nod to a couple of other things that are going on for the subscribers over at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. If you're on there now, you will see that we have our readers show where we had one of our patrons has become a guest on the show and they have brought with them This is Connor McCarthy. He's brought with him the book At Swim Two Birds by Flan O'Brien. So you can hear if you're interested in that book, come to our patron. And the next live episode that we have on July the 8th, Wednesday, July the 8th we will be doing, we're working our way through the Booker Prize winners.

And the next episode for July the 8th is Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. And we've all enjoyed revisiting that book, haven't we gone? A mere 672 pages of revision. Yes. So if you're interested in those, please do come and join us at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Otherwise, we'll see you here back here in a fortnight for some more summer reading. Well, indeed. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books.

Today's format is a little different. We bring you a summer reading special in which we've each chosen two books, one recently published, and one from the vaults. I'm John Mitchinson. I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And I'm Nicky Birch, the producer of Battlisted. It was the 19th century American social reformer Henry Ward Beecher who wrote that there was a temperate zone in the mind between luxurious indolence and exacting work. And it is to this region just between. laziness and labour that summer reading belongs.

Well, that is very much the region where we backlisted three have pitched a row of makeshift tents. We're not glamping, everybody. We're glumping because we've churk because I'm so sorry. It's a damp summer. Oh, it's a damp summer. Also, as long-term listeners to this podcast will realize, there is a divide in the ranks between my colleagues who, for some bizarre reason, favour hotter months

and myself who spurns them and tries to stay indoors. I don't keep this deathly pallor by wandering around outside boosting my vitamin D. Or is it B? D, D, isn't it? I think. Who cares if you don't get it, Andy? Yeah, exactly. I just kind of emerge. So we've chosen half a dozen books, and we were reviewing our choices of books. I have to say five of these six books are quite grim. I don't think you're selling them properly.

I am. I am. That's what... Is that a big sell? Okay, sorry. It is for me. I mean, I would take no book to the beach because I never go to the beach. But I would, you know, any of these would cheer me up as I wait for autumn to come. I'd be a little disappointed if people were listening to a backlisted summer reading special and expecting beach-ready kind of tomes. I think it's okay to have a miserable book on the beach.

That's okay, because actually what the beach is, it's not really I need to be cheered up. It's I've got an intense three-hour reading experience ahead of me. Exactly. You're absolutely delighted to have a book that's taking you into somewhere completely, some parallel universe. You know, you say on the beach, Nikki,

I think Neville shoots on the beach, which is one of the most miserable books ever written. So thank you, thank you, Neville Shoot for that. We still haven't done the shoot episode. Oh, the shoot. The shoot episode that has been suggested.

It has several times. But we, you know, so many authors, so little time, we haven't managed to squeeze Neville into eight years worth of shows, but there's still time. Now, Nikki Birch, producer of Batlist is you're actually walking it like you talk it,

or cycling it like you talk it, because you read, read your first summer read this summer on the road, didn't you? On your holidays? I did, yeah. I was cycling around the highlands of Scotland and I asked the audience, ask a friend for a relevant book to take with me to Scotland and the internet answered. And they answered actually a book that you've already talked about on backlisted, which was convenient. Now, listen, before we get onto the book, let's just clear the air. Right. So it wasn't the internet, Nikki, it was a human being and their name is Neil Christie. Right. So Neil,

thank you very much. Thanks, Neil. And also Kerry Morgan, so those two listeners recommended to you. I mean, you've got some amazing recommendations actually. It's worth going on to Twitter and seeing if you can find that thread. It's very interesting. But like Neil recommended it because he, this book had been brought to his attention because we've talked about it on backlisted. We haven't done a whole episode on it, but I think I put it in one of my what I've been reading slots that we used to do. And it was on episode 155, which was the Stephen Sondheim episode. We talked about it there.

And I wanted to ask you, Nikki, why didn't you read it then? Why do you need? Why don't you trust me? Why do you trust Neil and Kerry? What's wrong with me? What am I, chop liver? You're not chop liver, Andy. I think it's just verification.

Neil and Kerry added verification to your previously good recommendation. And I'm very pleased. Actually, if Andy's done the recommendation, I'm like, okay, I'm good to go. I'll definitely go for it. So I'm very pleased to know that I'm reading something that you had already. And you'd recommend it, but also on the front of this edition, it's got a fantastic kind of quote from Maggie O'Farrell that says, I once decided to become friends with someone on the sole basis that she named O'Calladonia

as her favourite book. And as I'm a huge Maggie O'Farrell fan, I was like, yeah. And let me just put your own logic to you, Andy. if Nikki followed all your recommendations, all 193 books and counting that you have talked about on badmisted, she'd have years, realistically, she'd have years of reading to get through. A lot of beaches, that is. I'd never go to work.

I'd never be editing the show. Just be on the beach. Anyway, the point is, what is the book, Nikki? I've chosen O'Calladonia by Elspith Barker, and it was a book that you mentioned. And it was really great book to have while reading. to read, sorry, while cycling in the Highlands of Scotland, because it is set in the Highlands of Scotland or at least towards Aberdeen.

And in a kind of true, as we used sort of trailed at the beginning, it is a bit miserable. You know, it's not the kind of joyful book. But what I didn't realise until after I finished and read about it is quite a lot of it is autobiographical. Indeed. And I was, you know, which is really amazing actually, because Elspeth herself, like the character, Janet grew up in this large house that it was also doubled up as a boy's home. And obviously the main character, Janet, is very much into literature and books. And nobody understands her and appreciates her.

So you can imagine, I'm guessing the writer may have had some connection with that too. But it's right at the beginning. It says that, you know, Janet, she's 16, she's murdered. And this is the story of her short life up until the point of her death. And interesting that Maggie O'Farrell likes it because she uses that device in two of her books. Main character is dead and we're told that at the beginning. I thought that was quite interesting. But one of the things about Janet's life that is really notable is that nobody really understands her.

She doesn't know how to interact with people. And she has these kind of unasked for sexual advances or stroke assaults, which she finds quite disturbing, doesn't she, right up until kind of throughout her life. And nothing is done about them. And actually, when she herself makes her own advance, that's when everything sort of unravels. It's kind of like, you know, people are allowed to come on to her. And nobody seems to, or she doesn't know how to handle it, but it's not allowed the other way. And it's, her family are basically horrified by her.

And because she just doesn't understand how to act in society. And actually the way I read it was she's probably autistic. Oh, that's interesting. Because she doesn't understand social conventions. She's obsessed by things, animals, words. Yeah. And ends up in these awful situations like these kind of, as I said, of these sort of sexual advances.

So it's really interesting. That's how I read it. I don't know if you felt the same, Andy. Well, I said on the episode that it is across, for me, it was a cross between Shirley Jackson and Dodie Smith, i.e. we have always lived in I Capture the Castle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It owes a lot to both those novels.

And I cannot imagine that is. If listeners, admirers of we have always lived in the castle, or I capture the castle, they wouldn't enjoy O'Calladonia. The other thing is, Elspeth Barker was said to be working on another novel for many years after this. Because this is her only novel, isn't it? But this, as it turns out, is her only novel. I remember it coming out. I'm sure John does as well in 1991. It was, you know, it was well reviewed.

It was. I had a copy on the shelf for nearly 30 years before I read it. It was one of those. I picked it up after work one day. I think, oh, I'll read that. And 30 years later I did. And it was wonderful. It was hiding there on my shelf in plain sight.

Nikki, you've made it sound, it's very interesting. My impression of it, while I agree with what you're saying, was I felt there was a kind of phantasmagorical element to it. That was the note that stays with me. a few years after reading it. Almost Gorman Gasty.

Yes, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So more... Gothic, almost. Gothic, more Gothic than psychological. Yeah.

Interesting. Also, this novel and the other two I just mentioned, they all feature female protagonists who are bookish. You know, they're all novels by bookish people who have been bookish children or bookish adolescents. And I think that suffuses O'Callonia. that sense of a writer, writing about an autobiographical novel about how much they like to read and how reading informed how they see the world and how they think of themselves in relation to the

world. And it made them separate from everyone else. Can I read a bit from it? Yeah. Okay. So this is a bit from, and I suppose this is the kind of thing that made me think about her having some kind of neurodivergence. She's the eldest of a number of children.

I can't remember exactly like five or six kids. Mother Vera seems to pop out children all the time but only really likes babies and not children. She's out in the garden, and I'll just go on from here. One afternoon she was told to bring the baby in from the garden. Reluctantly, she trailed out into the still early autumn air. The pram was on the lawn some way from the house. With clumsy fingers, Janet undid the stiff navy cover,

pulled back innumerable blankets and scrabbled under the hood for the swaddled occupant who began to roar, fixing Janet with an unblinking glare. It was difficult to pull her from under the hood. Janet tried to lower it and cut her fingers in its joints so that blood dripped onto the baby shawls. Louder came the roars. It began to rain. The shawls were unraveling and catching on the metal parts of the hood.

She pulled at them and tore a great hole in the lacy cobweb. In desperation Janet seized the infant by her head and dragged her out, clutching at the corners of shawl and looping them over the flail. tailing torso. The whole bundle slithered through her hands and lay shrieking frantically on the dank grass. Janet could not lift it up. It was far heavier than she would have ever guessed. When she held the baby up before, she had simply been deposited on her lap. She'd never carried her. So she grabbed such projections as she could find, a shoulder and a fiercely resisting arm, and dragged the whole mass, shawls trailing, through mud and snagging on leaves over the grass

and across the gravel, and at last to the kitchen door, where Vera and now. Nanny greeted her, first with horror and then with fury. There it is. There it is. Do you see what I mean? She's sort of, she's not understood what they've asked her to do, which is bring the baby in. And she's saying, okay, I'll take the baby in. And therefore does these things which are objectionable and horrid.

Can I ask on a side note whether you enjoy reading books in the place in which they're set? Yes, I think it's great. It really, it's really wonderful. You know, it really makes you just, because this book has lots of descriptions of, well, how much she loves spending time, you know, alone in the big castle and where they live and the Scottish brooding countryside. I would like to recommend the novel Sheep's Clothing by Celia Dale. It was originally published in 1988.

It was Celia Dale's 13th and final novel, and she wrote it in her mid-70s. and she was born in 1912 and she died in 2011 just a couple of weeks before her 100th birthday and before she her career as a novelist she was the novelist Ruma Goddons secretary and actually people know remarkably little about Celia Dale

this is one of the wonderful things about her well we'll talk about this in a minute but she is genuinely one of those authors who you know this novel was published as recently as 1980 the facts about her life are very thin on the ground. So you do judge the books as books rather than as the work of a well-known personality of some sort. Now, when we recorded one of these episodes a few years ago,

it was our first summer of COVID episode in 2020. I recommended another of her novels called A Helping Hand, which was originally published in 1966 and which had been recommended up to us by our friends, Becky and Nora, at Curtis Brown Heritage. And I think I said on that episode, it was one of the least appropriate

and therefore glorious, most glorious summer books imaginable. It was so, it's a helping hand, it's so disturbing. It's about targeting the elderly and taking care of them in all senses. Is this equally? Equally as disturbing.

Well, yes. It's so, so, so grim. But oh my goodness, it's wonderful. They're like Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, but then some terribly dark tales of the unexpected or black mirror almost style element of terror involved. And also they're remarkably cruel novels. a sort of exhilaratingly cruel.

No character is safe in any sense and no character is nice even the ones you think might be nice. They never are. Is this why you're so fascinated about Celia? What could have made her write like this? Well, she, you know, the idea of writing, somebody writing this particular novel,

Sheep's Clothing, in their mid-70s, strikes me as both sort of brave and hilarious. It's about two women who meet in Holloway Prison. And they decide together to pose as representatives of social services and visit the elderly falsely promising them increased pensions. Which as a premise is not, you know, we said beach reads, didn't we? We said beach reads.

And the scheme is initially very successful. but then something goes wrong. I am so shy of giving anything away about this. I'm just going to read the opening and you'll understand why this so appealed to me. This is how it begins. Two women stood outside in the shadow of the overhang from the walkway above. For Mrs. Davis lived on the ground floor of a block of council flats, a mixed blessing. For although it meant she had no stairs to cope with and need never worry whether the lift had been put out of order yet again, she was a sitting target for hit-and-run bell-ringers, letterbox rattlers, window-bangers and dog dirt. And worse.

So far, she had been lucky, but she knew better than not to keep her door on the chain. The older of the two women spoke. Good afternoon, dear. Yes. We're from social services. Yes. May we come in for a moment? She was a pleasant-spoken woman in late middle age.

carrying an official-looking briefcase as well as a handbag, from which she produced a plastic-covered card with her picture on it. She showed this to Mrs. Davis, who could just make out the likeness in the bad light of the overhang and through the narrow opening of the door. Just a minute, just a minute. Flustered, she closed the door and slipped off the chain, then opened it again. The social services is it? What do they want? Nothing to worry about, dear. In fact, quite the reverse. Good news, we think you'll find. Good news. Is it me allowances? Something like that. "'Well, you better come in.' "'Thank you.' "'Smiling, the woman stepped inside.

"'Mrs. Davis made her way back into the sitting-room, "'where Radio 2 still sniggered away in its corner. "'The two women followed her, "'the second much younger than the first, "'a pallid girl, with long brown hair "'remnisant of the late John Lennon's, "'and carrying a zipped-up tote bag. "'The older woman said,

"'This is my colleague, Mary. "'I'm Mrs. Black from the DHSS, group OAP B-22. That's a special group you won't have had dealings with before, which is why we're here. May we sit down? Nauty. I mean, aren't you hooked already? Aren't you hooked?

It definitely has that Ruth Rendellie feeling to it. So here's the thing about this. I was thinking about this. One of the things I love about Celia Dale's novels, which are being brought back into print by Dawn books, is that they are, I hate, I disdiscay. dislike the phrase lost classics. And I wouldn't describe these as lost classics. It seems to me, but this, since we started backlisted, the idea of the lost classic has become an ever more marketable commodity. And there's a lot of republication going on in this area of books which have been overlooked for some decades, often justifiably so, but sometimes not. And I realize

that I feel I don't want Celia Dale to fall into the category of quote unquote neglected lady novelist. Why not? Because I can't think of

anyone else who really writes like her. I would love somebody to write like this now. Nobody does. Who writes about old people living in council flats? Who writes about the social services

in there? Who of advanced years does that. She strikes me as really unusual. She writes very cleanly. She writes utterly without sentimentality. So it's not the idea that the books are lost classics, but it's more that as a writer, she's got such a particular voice. I mean, we compared her to Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, but she's far more acid than Barbara Vine. I'm delighted that some of these are back in bookshops again and I hope Dawn or someone is planning on on bringing more back. I've made a note that I want to read more late Margaret Drabble after our Margaret Drabble episode.

I wonder if Margaret Jabbles a bit like that in her later novels. I just don't know whether that's true or not. But you're right about the sort of the council flat milieu. Very, very few novels are so in that. I'm struggling to think probably Angus Wilson's late call is about the only one that I can think of But that's a very different kind of novel. Also, I'd just like to add, we seem to be living in quite a weird world now where the real lost classics are novels by Iris Murdoch

or John Updike or Doris Lessing. You know, writers who were massive in their time, who were still in print, who are still on bookshelves, but who seem to me little talked about, you're unlikely to find them on front tables, whereas for whatever reason you'll find K. Dick is freely and easily available to read, but the novels of Doris Lessing Lesser.

I even would say this, John, about our experience reading E.M. Forster. Really? Well, you'll find Ian Forster in a bookshop, though. You'd always find Foster. But our response, if anyone hasn't yet listened to our episode on a passage to India by E.M. Forster, please, please do. Our response to that novel, both John and I found that a revelatory experience, and it's just a perfect example of,

well, you sort of think you know what they're about. So why would you spend time actually reading them best to go straight to Celia Dale? Well, maybe, yes, but sometimes a classic is a classic... For a reason. For a reason, which is that it's extremely good and will surprise you every time you go back to it, you know?

Forster seems to me synonymous with the 1990. 80s and early 90s Merchant Ivory films which are those are good adaptations there's nothing wrong with them but it's kind of locked him into a particular time Yeah but the books are more than

I mean passage for injury is a lot more than I mean in fact it's a book that's straining against all of those Edwardian cliches in a really extraordinary way Well that's cool Celia Dale Sheets Clothing by Celia Dale Johnny what are we got

I've going to recommend a memoir which has just been published as the new book by a guest on backlisted, Catherine Taylor. Catherine is a very astute critic, writes for lots of different publications as a critic, was previously publishing director of the Folio Society and a director of English pen. And amazingly, and she's been on backlisted a couple of times. She has. She did, yeah, D.H. Lawrence famously.

And also the Nabokhov episode, The Gift, I think. Oh, that's right. in the day. And this is her first book, a memoir. It's called The Sturrings, a memoir in Northern Time. She grew up in Sheffield. She was born in New Zealand. There are numbers of, there are a number of connections that I feel with her story in this book, sort of one, the New Zealand connection, although she didn't spend long in New Zealand. She should go. The second is it's a very, very good and carefully recorded history of a very history of a a period of time in the north of England, particularly the 1980s into the 90s, which I think

hasn't been written about as much as you might think. And I guess I suppose ended up evolving into the literary world. Her mom ran a bookshop in Sheffield, which became very popular with not only local writers, but also Phil Oakey and people who were, you know, the Sheffield band scene. So it's a book that has a lot of the beats in this book are things that. feel very familiar to me. She writes about obviously the background to her growing up as a woman in Sheffield, as a girl in Sheffield is the Yorkshire Ripper and that sense of being kind of the dread that kind of settled on the north of England, which I remember really acutely, there was a brief people who know the story will know that it was a brief period in the middle of the search

for the Yorkshire Ripper where some hoaxer had sent in tapes that. that seemed to suggest he came from Weirside. And in... I can remember listening on the car radio to them as a child. The curate of my grandparents' church in Sondland was interviewed by the police in connection with it. So it all turned out. So there's that kind of Gordon-Burnian background. She writes about the Greenham Common Women.

She goes down, she escapes and goes down to see the Grim and Common Women twice and is really inspired by what she finds there. that at the same time there is that, which all comes back to you when you're reading the book, the sense of imminent nuclear catastrophe. And she writes about threads, the amazing BBC film that was set in Sheffield, which she was sort of, as it were, an extra in. So I think if you are interested to feel the warp and west, the texture of life in a northern setting in a home where there wasn't much money,

I'm going to put a little bit on that she's going to read at the moment, which is set in the summer of 1976, which, as you discover, is the last summer, her family are together. Her father leaves her mother, which is a really traumatic experience for her. And there are more traumatic experiences she develops a serious thyroid illness. She goes to university and I won't go into all the details. I would just say that if you are, it's very, I think, a real challenge to write a memory. memoir, a kind of coming of age memoir, and to do it with as much, there's a certain amount of bravery, but also just a real fineness of language and of insight into it. I love the fact, you know, I know the songs that she's listening to. It's very much the same songs that we

were all listening to. I know the films that she's watching. I know that sense of feeling like, you know, you're trapped into a life that's not right for you and you want to move beyond it. But there is a particular issue which I, you know, as a man, that sense of being a woman and being vulnerable, that she captures brilliantly. And I found it incredibly moving. It's just a very unique situation to be in, to read a memoir of someone you know. I mean, it may be not less unique for you guys working and publishing and, you know, but it's quite, that's quite a unique thing, isn't it? I think there's also, there's also a very odd thing that happens. she's a very good writer and once you're in the story,

I'm no longer thinking of it is Catherine. The Catherine that I know, I'm thinking of this vulnerable girl with her mother and I'm thinking of the... I'll play a little bit, yeah. The summer of 1976 was the hottest in Britain since records began. As well as the intense, endless heat, the sweltering nation endured a severe water shortage, standpipes in the streets,

and a plague of ladybirds moving across the UK's cities and towns. During those drought-heavy weeks, the water levels of Derbyshire's Ladybauer reservoir shrank so low that long-submerged secrets were revealed. The ruins of Derwent Village, which, along with its neighbour Ashopton, had been evacuated and drowned in 1945 to make way for the creation of Ladybauer, rose up through the water like a ghostly revenant. Seeking relief from the heat of Sheffield, my family drove past the reservoir when evening the Moors too parched to visit during the day. One building, partially re-emerged from the watery debts, resembled a warning finger, pointing towards something I wasn't yet able to see. 1976 would be the last summer of our family as it existed up to that point. A typical family and an ordinary story,

although neither the family nor the story seems commonplace when it is your family and your story. At school, I was relentlessly unpopular, in an imprecise way. But after that year, something much more compelling and unsavory would replace the general apathy and animosity, at least when taken apart in the busy hands of my peers, when I achieved the singular honour of being the first person in my class whose parents had split up. I did say that mine was an ordinary story.

That long, scorching summer turned out to be the dividing line between an all too brief before and a vast, messy after. It remains filtered through a syrupy haze. The faultless past and the compromise present, are, I've found, unreliable lenses through which to view the world. What is certain is that I recall the years before 1976 only in fragments and impressions without a fixed chronology. The period that followed hardened my perception, while simultaneously blurring the outlines

I had presumed were solid. By the time I was old enough to ask what really happened, the once familiar faces had altered, some had turned away for good. Any excavator of personal history must assume the role of privacy. investigator into their own life. I have always loved detective stories. When I was very young, just before bedtime, I would sit, wrapped in my dressing gown, with my father, while he sipped his one glass of sherry or beer, and watch American shows on television, Hawaii 5-0, Kojak, Macmillan and wife, Ironside, and our favourite, Colombo. The last intrigued me most because of its

inverted narrative structure. The perpetrator of the crime is revealed to the audience at the opening of each episode. It is left to the perennially and deceptively rumpled detective, Lieutenant Colombo to go backwards, examine the variables, work out the formula, like a masterclass in algebra, and in that way, apprehend the criminal. In my own unearthing, I am both investigator and culprit. It's very good. It is very, it's an excellent book. Well, I'm telling you what, I'm loving these beach reads. Well, the long hot summer of 76. Yeah.

I'm loving them. I think we should take a break for a moment so we can hear a word from our sponsors. When the world keeps shifting, we're there to help you act with confidence. At HSBC, we bring together the people, ideas and capital that drive growth, backing your ambitions at every stage. So when you're preparing for the next generation, strengthening your portfolio, or you're entering new markets, we're there, bringing 100.

60 years of experience to help you move forward. HSBC, opening up a world of opportunity. Next, I'm going to talk a little bit about a novel by Sebastian Barry called Old God's Time. This, we're recording this on the 9th of August, 2023. And last week, Sebastian Barry's novel, Old God's Time, was announced as being on this year's Booker Prize, long list. you will probably, listeners will probably be familiar with Sebastian Barry or have read one or two novels by him.

He's been on the book a long list before in 2011 on Canaan's side, and he's been on the short list twice for a long, long way in 2005 and the Secret Scripture in 2008. And the Secret Scripture the same year won the Costa Book of the Year, and then he won the Costa Book of Year again. I think he's the only person who ever did that, Days Without End in 2017. And all Sebastian Barry's novels seem to take place in the same country, in the same dreamscape, if you like. Characters appear in different books. And Old God's Time is about a retired policeman called Tom Kettle, a widower, a man who has lost both his. children and two policemen come knocking on the door to talk about an unsolved murder from many years earlier and gradually over the course of the novel a story unravels that manages somehow

to tell the story of Ireland itself over the last 40 to 50 years it's only 200 pages long this novel. It's incredibly moving. And I interviewed Sebastian Barry on stage at the start of the year. That was at the Faversham Literary Festival in Kent. And when I say I interviewed him, what I mean is I sat on stage and said only three or four things. He didn't, he requires no interview. He is, John, have you seen him read? Yeah, he's amazing. He is just the most extraordinary reader of his own work. And a wonderful engaging audiences. He had the audience eating at

because he's been an actor and he's a performer. He is a performer and he's not afraid to perform. So it was an incredibly memorable evening. It really fixed

this novel in my mind and I've thought about it all year which is why I wanted to bring it now to backlisted and tell people about it now and actually not fall into the trap what we were just talking about before the break of don't pass up books on the booker long list or short list just because they're on the book a long list or short list. Because some readers will think it's too obvious.

Some won't. Some will be drawn to it, but others will think, oh, well, this novel doesn't need me. Other people will do it. You know, this is a really, really good piece of fiction. Deserving, I don't know, but it really, it's pleasing to me that it's there. and he's having another shot. I'm really, really pleased for him. So we're going to listen to you now.

There is an audiobook of Old God's Time, and it's not read by Sebastian, but he did a launch event in Dublin in February, I think, this year. And as part of that, he read from the novel. So we're going to hear a couple of minutes of him reading, and that will give you a flavour of what he does on stage. And I would ask, while you listen to this, just think to yourself,

what this must look like on the page and then compare it with what he's doing with his interpretation and his voice. Now what you're going to hear is this retired policeman, Tom Kettle, is reminiscing about his late wife, how they met and how they stated their feelings to one another and their histories to one another. She says, I don't know who I am. There's just no one for you to marry. At this point, he didn't believe he had mentioned marriage. But she spoke so sadly, so precisely, and so bravely that he certainly didn't say so. And he immediately thought, by God, if she wants to marry, I will do that.

And it even entered his stupid head. It must have. Tom couldn't remember. She sat on in her denim glory the jeans like a second skin or a skin she could shed with that gathered, collected set to her shoulders. She had a little purse with a heart on it, like the knickers, more of a wallet maybe. It was then she extracted the sacred photo and told him the story of how she had won it, how she had stolen it from oblivion, those damnable nuns.

But then, by her courage, she released him to tell her his story, his own sorry, bloody tale of woe, All the dead mothers! He was gabbling, excited. He was aware at the back of his head of his lousy pay, detective though he was. That wasn't the point. They'd managed they would. And who the hell would they have at such a ceremony?

That wasn't the point either. Nothing in the normal way seemed to be because he knew she wasn't finished. There was something further to say. He could see it as if it were a... a raven sitting on her shoulder. They had come to a huge decision about their lives, almost

by happenstance, by things benignly conspiring. But she wasn't finished. The shoulders were still set. She wasn't finished because she never would be. Quothed the raven, never would be.

I mean, I would follow him round with the tape recorder, hoping he read different bits of the novel that I could then comp together on a bootleg of his... Why is he not doing the audiobook? It's a really interesting question because you would have to say that the performance doesn't necessarily... I mean, this is ridiculous thing to say he wrote it, but the performance doesn't necessarily

match what's on the page. And the way the audiobook is read on the page is far more neutral. But there is almost like a kind of a songwriter's interpretation of a piece of work in performance is very different to what it might be in the studio. And I think there's a similar thing going on there with Sebastian Barry. I remember, I think I might have said this to us on a lot listed to you guys on a lot listed. I once recorded a Russell Brand's audio book, Revolution. And think what you do about Russell Brand, but his recording of the book, he'd written this book.

And he would just be reading it going, well, that's rubbish. I'm just going to say something else. You know, actually, him reading it allow was brilliant. He brought so much to the reading. Creativity in the moment, right? It was amazing. Yeah. Well, anyway, that's Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry.

And whether it goes any further in the race or not, I really, I feel very fortunate actually to have had seven months to think about the book before I talk about it on this. So, you know, I didn't read it in Ireland. I didn't read it on my holidays. but I've had all year to live with it and think, well, it's probably one of the best novels that I've read this year. Well, that's high praise indeed.

Nikki, Book Alonglist. Yeah, I also took up your Booker Longlist mantle and your Book Along list challenge and thought I would also read one of the books from the Booker Longlist and thought I would read A spell of Good Things by Ayabami Adebayo. I haven't read, I think she's done one other book.

This is her second novel, isn't it? Yeah. I haven't read the past, the first one, which I think I might go back to you after this. Stay with me, it's called. Came out in 2017. Right, and that's, I think, that was a romance, I think, as I understood it. I think, I would suggest, of all the books that we are talking about today, this is perhaps the most traditional beach read, summer reading.

And saying that, it's not a misery memoir. There are miserable moments in it. The reassured listeners, don't worry. There is some gloom in it. Yeah. And we'll play you a clip of a bit of that. So don't worry. But it's probably you're more, you know,

it's one of those books that follows the lives of two families in Nigeria and from opposite sides of the tracks. And eventually it's how their lives intersect towards the end in sort of a melodramatic way. So that's kind of more your traditional family saga, two families from different places. yeah and it's what you might say a gripping read in that kind of thing although gripping

sometimes because I actually listen to it rather than read it and going back to what you said about Sebastian this is a very different kind of listening experience and I think it's interesting because it's

a Nigerian author very much set in a sort of fictitious Nigerian town I think you know that there's different kind of different languages in Nigeria. This is Yoruba. And it's very Nigerian. And in a way that I say that is in sometimes they're sort of anglicised or Americanised. This is very much, there's lots of colloquial expressions, food, some pigeon English, lots of Yoruba dialect and lots of crucially naming conventions, right, around how you refer to people. When they're married, you refer to them

as differently or when they're, if you're looking up to somebody, you refer to something. somebody is as different names. And that's the same people being referred to differently in the book, depending on who's talking about them. And I think that, listening, I found that sometimes quite hard to follow. But I think maybe reading that might be easier to understand because you can kind of go back and think, what was that? But listening, you don't tend to rewind so much. So I just think it's a different experience. And I think if I was... Does Adebeio read it herself? No. No, she doesn't read it herself. There's two. people reading it because it follows two lives and there's a man and a woman reading it and I'll

play you a clip of it. Yes, please. And I'll set it up. So the two protagonists or the two main people in the families, it does follow their families entirely as a Wirala, she's a junior doctor and Eniola who's a young guy who is struggling to get an education. But this clip is about Wirala. She's the junior doctor and she's just got engaged to Kunli.

Now her sister, Matara, is kind of, she's a bit younger and she's sort of defying those naming traditions that I was talking about. So she's not calling somebody auntie this or so-and-so-and-so-and-so this. She's just calling them by their name. So that's around the sort of modernisation. So here's a clip. So, yes, A, Wurala has just got engaged to Koonli, and her sister Matara is the one who's defying the naming conventions. She doesn't just call you Wuraola, he frowned. She calls you Dr. Wura. Well, that's who I am. Uralah zipped up her bag.

You should have gotten a medical degree if you wanted someone to call you, Dr. Kunli. He slapped her cheek with his palm wide open, so his forefinger poked her eye. Then he followed that with a back hand as he brought his arm back to his side. Urala staggered backward. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, lips pursed into an angry line. Watching her press a finger against the eye he had put, quote. The eye she could not bear to open because it hurt so much. At first, Waraola thought she was the one who kept yelping. But once she could open both eyes,

she saw it was Motara, standing at the end of the corridor, holding her chin as if to keep her joy in place. So quite interesting. I've never heard a book with that strong Nigerian accent in English language before. So I think if I was going to do this again, it really brings a lot to it, having a good Nigerian voice like that, but I would like to read it and listen to it at the same time. There's a really good audio book platform called a zigzag, X-I-X-I-G,

X-A-G that enable you to do exactly that. You can read, as it were, kind of the e-book as it's actually playing on the screen in front of you. So from one device. It's quite clever. Right. Well, this is the perfect time to get your zigzag account. But just one more thing I want to say about the book.

It's basically a look about the overall book is about the dangers of ignoring deep sort of economic divides that run through community and how difficult life is and these difficult choices families have to make in Nigeria to kind of survive. Like, do you pay rent or school fees? And so it is. It does say a lot around it politics and kind of the murky side of politics and corruption and those sorts of things. So it's a good, like if I want to get a good Nigerian family saga for your beach reader, if you enjoyed, for example, Age of Vice by Deepty Kapoor, you will like this book. Yes. I was thinking, John, when you were talking about the virtues of reading while listening,

after we made the Tolkien episode, several people said to me, did you really read the Silmarillion all the way through? And I did read the Silmarillion, but I'm going to let it a bit list us into a secret all these years later. I did it by having the book open in front of me and setting the narration to 2.5. 2.5?

Yeah, so I would follow the words really fast. Tolkien delivered by Pinky and Perky, you know, Yeah, no, well, no, because on a orderable. You're an an alphabetical at the time. Yeah. And that's why I cannot remember anything about the Silver Rillian. But I have read it. I have read it.

My eyes were glued to the page while Martin Shaw did all the names. I tell you what, that is a heroic reading. He's reading of the Silver Rillian. Goodness me. Yeah, goodness me, that must have been difficult. but anyway but sometimes I do read if we're preparing for an episode

I will sometimes read the audio and read the book at the same time not a 2.5 I hasten to add but if it's something I need to really get a feel for quite quickly it's a very good way of doing it yeah I can imagine also it helps you with the characterisation and particularly if you had someone like Sebastian Barry that you know really giving it you know

that's fantastic yeah Do you feel, going back to just adabio for a moment, and going back to our original thing about reading, if you were going to visit Nigeria, do you feel you get a really strong sense of the sort of sight, sells, smells, smells, the feeling of being in it. 100%. Yeah.

This is the book to take with you on our, well, there are many brilliant books that are available to us set in Nigeria. We're very lucky. If you're interested in Nigerian literature, English, I know in America it's the same. There's lots. But this is one of many. I think you could really enjoy.

And not only does it talk about the food and the culture, but it also is lots of musical references, just things I just don't know because I'm not Nigerian. And so it makes you want to kind of find out a bit more. And I think if you were there, although it's a fictitious city, you definitely recognise lots and you definitely get probably even more from the book.

Well, I, for one, will be very angry if neither of these books makes the book a short list. I feel invested now in both of them. So I think we've got time for one. We've got time for one more. I know what it is as well. Go on, John. Now for something completely different.

This book will not be on the book of short list because it isn't a work of fiction. Although it is in some strange way, it could easily be a work of fiction. So remarkable is the story that it tells. It is a reissue of a 2012 book by John Higgs. Another former guest. Another former guest that glory is in the title, The KLF, Chaos, Magic and the band who burned a million pounds. Famously in 1994, Jimmy Caution and Bill Drummond, the men behind the KLF who became the Kay Foundation.

Previous to that, they had been the justified ancients of Mumu. They were also doctors. They had a number one hit with Doctoring the TARDIS. They created an extraordinary sequence of subversive hits in the late 80s and early 90s. And John Higgs decided he wanted to write a kind of unauthorized, as somebody said, a sort of wildly unauthorized biography of the band. A lot of people who don't like pop biographies will be pleased to know that this is, if there was ever, as Pete Pafidi says, a pop biography for people who don't read pop biographies,

this is it. It's actually a story of such joyous kind of unpredictability. It's as much about, if I told you, It's as much about the remarkable trilogy of novels called The Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson. A cult reading that, as you find out from this book, that a lot of people who reference those books have never actually read them all the way through, including Bill Drummond. It has conspiracy theorists. The whole, you learn about discordianism out of which I think Robert Anton Wilson's kind of ideas came. It's a brilliant, brilliant, funny, strange, peculiar.

book. Well, it's the thing, John, about John Higgs's books is they are, his great skill, I think, is making connections, making leaps from one thing to another, feel organic and funny and thought-provoking. His book about William Blake is, in a similar way, both about William Blake and not about William Blake. Exactly. But also the most illuminating book I've ever read about Blake. What other books has he done? He did a book about the Roman Road, didn't he? He did a book about Watling Street, the Roman Road, which is one of my favourites.

He's written very recently. He wrote a brilliant book about love and let die, which was about the Beatles and James Bond. He's written a book about the future, called The Future Starts Here. He wrote a book about the life of Timothy Leary. And, I mean, I think what's the... really clever about this book. He writes so well about philosophy, science, religion. I'll just give you one paragraph and then I'm going to read a little funny story which I think sums the whole book up, but he says, from a multiple model perspective, this is idea that we have different models of reality,

right? The burning of a million quid in the boathouse endure can be said to be both a meaningless act by two attention-seeking assholes, which was in no way connected to the wider changes in the world at large, and also a magical act that forged the 21st century. This makes it far more interesting that it was just one or the other for the irrational, irrational magical world and the unconnected real world dovetail when they tell much the same story from incompatible viewpoints. There is a rush of insight and aesthetic harmony, and that's what I get from this book, a rush of insight. But listen, here's a story from early on in the book, which gives you the weirdness. As I say, you've got all kinds of weird stuff.

But justified Aetians of Mumu, which I didn't know until I read this book, were characters in Robert Anton Wilson's trilogy. So a lot of this stuff is Drummond and Cauty, the stuff that they were doing, they were taking stuff that they were quite serious about. But Echo and the Bunny Men were a band that were managed by Bill Drummond, and they always said that they were called Bunny Men because they're in the same way that Playboy models and Bunny Girls.

Drummond really disliked this and he was desperate to find out what he thought was the real, what was the real echo. The Bunnymen were really what he thought they were. So he says, when the band gave their press the version of the story, which was, you know, they were inspired by them. Drummond held his tongue. I had to stop myself from butting in and saying, no, you've got it wrong. It's nothing to do with Bunny girls.

bunny men are the scattered tribes that populate the northern rim of the world and are followers of a mythical being, a divine spirit, a prime mover who takes the earthly form of a rabbit. But he says, I didn't. So listen to this. This is just such too good a story for everybody to end on. And one of the lovely things about this edition of the book, it was written in e-book and John's, it's now being published by Videnfeld and Nicholson with fantastic notes all the

way through of him saying, oh, I don't know what I was trying to do here. I'm not sure this paragraph works quite as well as I thought it did at the time. So we all love that. Anyway, you'll love this, Andy, because you'll know the album. But this is just, just bear with, it's very, very funny. In 1980, Echo and the Bunnyman released their first album, Crocodiles. Then there's a footnote that says, the final section of this chapter is probably on my favorite part of the book.

Drummond had licensed the album to Warner's, thus keeping Zoo pure and free from Zoo was his record company, and free from such self-indulgent projects as albums. But it still felt clearly like a compromise. McCulloch and the band clearly had very different dreams from Drummond. They wanted to make albums tour the world and become hugely rich and successful. As their manager, Drummond had to accept this, but he was still of the impression that a real man should just make a few perfect singles and then split up.

The album sleeve was lying on the floor of his office when Drummond glanced at it. Its image foreshortened by the angle. The cover photo showed the band in a forest at night, lit by strong red and yellow light. In the centre of the frame, bassist Les Patterson sat leaning against an ash tree, which strangely had two primary trunks, which gracefully curved around each other. Then suddenly the picture changed. Red and evil, a huge rabbit's head stared at Drummond, solid and unblinking. Instantly, he knew he was looking, what he was looking,

at. It was Echo. And then, in a blink, the band photo returned. Picking up the sleeve, Drummond realized that it contained an optical illusion. The tree trunks looked like the head and ears of a rabbit, one that appeared evil, thanks to the downward angle of its eye, the sharp elongated point to its face and the red light on the tree. Once he'd seen it, it seemed incredible that no one had ever noticed it before. This was weird. Echo was supposed to be an idle fantasy of Drummond's, a strange personal thought that he kept to himself. It was not supposed to appear out in the world, eyeing him coldly from an album sleeve.

He spoke to the photographer to determine whether it had been done deliberately and learnt that it had not. The final cover photograph had been one that no one had wanted, but which had eventually been accepted as a compromise. No one had seen the rabbit head in the image before Drummond pointed it out. He was discreet when he spoke to the photographer, of course. He knew that the idea of Echo was a personal fantasy from his inner life, An idea that could survive in his mind, but not withstand the scrutiny of others,

but the appearance of the rabbit in the world outside him had strengthened the idea, giving it the potential to grow and evolve and become more elaborate and intricate. Such constructions grow secretly in many minds, acknowledged and understood only by their creators. Their imaginary nature does not mean that they are unable to affect the world at large. That's great. It's just great. It's great. So, brilliant.

Supplement that. Wonderful, wonderful. You're right, John. I have never heard that. I was really making me laugh. Supplement that story with my favourite story about the period when Bill Drummond was managing Echo and the Bunny Man. He sent the group out on tour and they went up to Scotland. They did.

The tour itinerary seemed quite strange. They were saying, why are we in third? or so one day and then back down in Edinburgh but then the following day we're flying up to Oben or something and it's because he'd drawn on the map of Scotland a set of bunny ears

and then booked the gigs around those ears the bunny shape right? Even madder he basically there was a place in Scotland and a place in Papua New Guinea that he felt were connected it by the manhole cover of the outside the office

of where they were working in Liverpool. And he fails to persuade, unsurprisingly by this stage, his relationship with the other band he managed, which was the teardrop explodes. He failed to persuade Julian Cope and the teardrops that they should go and play in the mountains of New Guinea. But the bunny men did go to Scotland

and they did trace the massive bunny ears. It's extraordinary book. And kind of brilliant. Higgs is the Perth. he tells it so well. And it's the added dimension of him kind of commenting on it through all the way through. It's just I can't think of it. I can't think of a better summer book, frankly.

Well, thank you guys. Imagine listeners that you went on a holiday and read all six of these books. Joy, what an amazing experience that would be. How brilliant. All right, everybody. Enjoy the rest of your summer. And we'll see you next time. Don't talk to the big rabbits.

See you soon. Bye. Bye. Thank you.