Backlisted - Summer Reading 2026

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Just in time for the summer holidays, the Backlisted team recommend six books we have enjoyed recently: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee; Boulder by Eva Baltasar; Flashlight by Susan Choi; The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley; The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly; and The Gilt Kid by James Curtis. New and not-so-new reading for the months ahead, as we take a brief break from our sabbatical to return for this 2026 Summer Reading special. Have a great summer. x Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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FX's The Shards, streaming August 5th on Hulu on Disney Plus. Sign up now at Disneyplus.com. Hi, it's Andy. And it's Nikki. Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome to our backlisted summer reading special. What's going to happen? What's going to happen, Nikki? Well, we've each brought two books to the table, which we think you might enjoy this summer.

And we're going to talk about how excited we are about them. This is a show that is always very popular with our audience every year, which is why we've decided to come back and interrupt our hiatus, our backlisted sabbatical to come and just do our hiatus. What a hiati for if they're not? for interruption. So here we are. Also, this explains why this is a slightly different format for summer reading than in previous years.

In the old days, we used to do summer reading at the end of summer as a kind of update on what we had read. But this is in time for summer and is based on the fact that we've actually got a bit more time this year, well, some of us have, to read what we like. So buckle up. And it is indeed.

It's going to be a bumpy ride. It is, at least it feels like an endless summer, doesn't it? It already feels like we're into the third heat wave of the summer. I know, I know. No more talk about heat waves, please. I hear it brings on more. I'm just going to quickly plug what's been happening on the Patreon. We had a chat this week in our Booker Prize book club about,

we had a really interesting discussion with lots of patrons present about Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. Next month, we will be going to be going. back to 1975 and the prize-winning book, Heat and Dust by Ruth Parababala, if you'd like to join us for that. It's happening on the 10th of August. So get across to www.com patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you can sign up to join us for that. We've also got an episode coming up of backlisted readers where our lovely patrons join us and bring a book with them. And the next episode is on Truman Capote and other VIII. voices, other rooms.

Amazing. And I owe a great debt to our friend Vowl for bringing us into Capote World. Great. And me into the TV series Capote versus the Swans, which we don't have time to talk about today. But nevertheless, that's been a good part of the summer already. I also owe a debt to Val. She had chosen other rooms, other voices, but I thought she'd chosen in cold blood.

So I ended up reading two Truman Capote books to prepare for that. show, which I'm very pleased about because they're both greats. What joy. Hashtag never enough Capote. Never Enough Capote. Right, Andy, what books are we going to talk about today? Okay. I'm enjoying this.

If we sound a bit jolly and on point, it's because our producer Nicky Birch is quite rightly enforcing a timing rule today. Crack on. So, if you listen over the next hour, but no more, you will hear us talking about the following books. The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly, Boulder by Ava Balthazar, The Guilt Kid by James Curtis,

as I walked out one midsummer morning by Laurie Lee. Flashlight by Susan Joy. You sound like you're reading the top ten there. I know. And in at number six. And once again at number one. We will land at near the end of the show on the Palm House, which is the new novel like Wendellin Riley. So we've all read.

We have all read. Right. Stick around, everybody, for the next 55 minutes and counting. Please, let's go first. John, what have you been reading this year so far? Okay. I'm very pleased to talk about. on this summer reading special, a relatively new book published earlier this year, The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly, published by Bloomsbury. And I think I'm delighted to say that it has just been awarded the Walter Scott

Prize for Historical Fiction, which I'm thrilled about. I'm thrilled for two reasons. One, because I think it's a brilliant book. And two, because for a long time, I published Alice Jolly. And I think she's one of, she's obviously been a guest on the show. I think she's one of the most interesting writers out there. What was her last novel called? Her last novel was called Mary Ann Seat imbecile.

That was a wonderful book. It was a wonderful book and it was runner up for the Rathbone Folio Prize. And before that she wrote an amazing memoir called Dead Babies in Seaside Towns, which won the Penn Ackley Prize and an O'Henry Prize. But I think it would be fair to say that she's never quite got the audience that I think she deserves. And I hope that winning the Walter Scott will help. And obviously the team at Bloomsbury, I think, doing a great job.

The Walter Scott Prize comes attached with a generous bequest, doesn't it? Isn't it one of the more financially rewarding prizes? It's quite a big chunk of cash. Dolly Alice. Hooray. What's the book about? I'll be absolutely honest. It's probably not the subject that most people would choose as a beach read.

But we don't have to rehearse that tired, sad old argument year in, out about Beatrice. It is, I think, however, a page turner. It is in that kind of extraordinary tradition of a book narrated by a child. And I'm thinking the tin drum. I'm also thinking books that were written more specifically for children like I Am David by Anne Holt or Emil and the detectives by Eric Kassner. It is set in 1930s Vienna and the narrator is Adelheide runner and the thing about Adelaide is she doesn't speak. What she does though is she writes and she draws and she obsessively collects matchboxes. She is as becomes fairly clear through the book, although it's never made utterly clear because it's obviously the whole book is narrated through

her, through her eyes is that she she suffers from a neuro, well, she is neurodivergent. I think we don't have to use the word suffer anymore. And she is taken by her family to meet a doctor, Dr. Asperger, who is a real person. And she goes to his famous Vienna Children's Hospital. And the story really is her perspective on one of the most fiercely contested controversial passages in the development of child psychology. Asperger is extraordinary. in that he doesn't just lock children away in asylums who've got educational challenges. He watches, observes, talks to them, listens to them, and develops a way of unlocking their potential,

which is great, which is why a particular form of autistic spectrum disorder, as it's now called, although disorder again is a word that's fiercely contested, is called, we used to be called Asperger's Syndrome. It's no longer called Asperger's syndrome because what has been, what was discovered is that Asperger, Dr. Asperger, rightly or wrongly, well wrongly, completely wrongly, consigned to certain death a number of the children he was dealing with. Once the Nazis took over and took over the hospital, they were, as you know, people were seen to be enfeebled with mental disabilities, as the Nazis would say, would be, were condemned to death. And that happened to a lot of children under his care. Exactly how many are wonder what circumstances are still contested. I just love what she does with history in the same way that with Mary Ann Seat, she takes, as it were, one of the servants that would be working in a in a house of a George Elliott novel or a Thomas Hardy novel and tells their story.

What she does here is she tells the story from within the children's hospital in Vienna, because we'll never know the truth. Does it go through up to the war? Oh, right through and out the other side. Wow. I know, I know. Can I say it's one of the most beautiful and uplifting books I've read? So there is that, but there is darkness in it.

But none of it is particularly, there is nothing egregious. or gratuitous about the way she writes. She tells Adelhyde's story. So I read a very quick couple of paragraphs from the beginning of it. Yeah. One of the things she does is she, a lot of Adelhydes writing things are capitalised. So you've got to put up with that.

Some people don't like that, but I think it's brilliant. After my death, how you read my book. So just putting that out there. No spoilers. This is the very beginning of the book. History is not history when it's happening. Do you understand? I hope you are listening.

No. you cannot ask questions. You can be sure that I will construct this historical record most accurately. I know because I lived through those wartime days. I saw it all and I recorded every detail in a most meticulous manner. Yet sadly my notebooks were destroyed. However, I recreate them here with absolute accuracy. You might like to know my name. People prefer stories which are personal. My name is Adelhyde Brunner, although they often call me the Matchbox girl. Please understand. I write for you now from my posthumous life, where most happily I have access to many documents such as government papers, newspaper reports, medical files, this information I may now view as from a

high tower, seeing all such information being clearly labelled within this book, yet I must also write this story as it materialised, not saying with the benefit of hindsight, etc, etc. So it goes on. Honestly, it's called the Matchbox Girl, Alice Jolly. And I think it's, I think it's her finest book yet. Okay. Now, at the end of each of these books, we know that people listening need to know certain hard facts. So I'm going to ask each of us three questions, John. Yeah. It's called The Matchbox Girl by Oz Jolie. How many pages is it, please? It is. It is 4006 pages long. Is it out in paperback? It is not yet out in paperback. Okay. That was my second question, Nikki. You've read my mind as ever. How long is it? Is it?

get out in hardback or payback. And finally, if not a beach, where would be the ideal spot to read this novel? Sitting in a cool shade with a glass of chilled reasoning. Because it is deeply involving. All right. Deeply involving. All right. All right.

I just want to know the answer to the question. That's what we've got here. So it's nearly 500 pages. It's a hardback and you should read it in the shade with a glass of reasoning. Perfect. Perfect. And it's got Nazis in it. Reading with Reasling, that's got to be another recommendation.

Right, let us move on to Nikki. Nikki, what have you been reading this year? Hold the news. The paperback is released on July the 16th. That's next week. Sorry, I've just seen that. Okay, well listen, everybody. It's no shorter, but it is in paperback.

If you're going on holiday to a shady grove with bottle of wine in your backpack, then you can also fit this in because it's coming out in paperback next week. Okay, Nikki. Can I answer your questions first? Yes. Okay, the book is called

Boulder by Ava Balthazar. How many pages is it? It is. It's a novella. So, I'm just checking the pages, 105. All right. They're very popular at the moment. Short book.

Short book. Is it a hardback or a paper bag? It is a paperback. And I suggest it being so short, you can read it in between things. You could just slip it in. You could read it like while you're waiting for a coach somewhere or get a train. It's a very easy. Right.

Okay. If not to read it on holiday, you could read it in transit. You could read it in transit. Yeah, okay. If you want a book just to go, oh, that journey, I'll just read it there. So that's like at the airport, you could smash through a whole book. So yes, so this is a book that. was originally published in Catalan in 2020. It's shortlisted for the 23 International Booker Prize.

And Ava Bautasar is a poet, but this is her second novella. So she's done, I think the first one was called Permafrost. And I think it's part of a series of exploring the inner world of different women, all in the first person. Now, I say that because I remember when we interviewed, we had a show with Philip Pullman. And I don't know if you remember, the thing that really struck with me is he said, I hate first person books when I open them and I see its first person, I throw them away. Okay. And I have to say, generally I feel like that too because I feel. Do you?

Well, I, yeah, and I was thinking about that with Midnight's children because a lot of that's first person. But I, it sometimes can feel a bit YA for me. Do you know what I mean? Really? It can do. Yeah. Well, I haven't read that. So that helps.

So maybe you need to, everyone can recommend me good first person. I say I'm just okay, carry on. Anyway, in this instance, I did carry on because it's only 104 pages, so I thought I'll stick with it. And it was, I'm pleased I did. And it did kind of, you know, I got beyond the first person. I'm not quite at Philip Pullman level, but I thought it has a bit of that in it. So what you're saying is if Philip Pullman picked this up to read it, he would be able to throw it a long way. Yeah, if he was honest true, he was on the judging panel of the 2023 International Booker Prize.

And that's probably why it didn't win. But so the reason I picked it up is I've just been to Iceland for a holiday. This was in the Iceland section of the Daunce bookshop that I went to. And so I thought, oh, great, it's slim. It's set in Iceland. But actually, what it is really is, I say it's not specific to Iceland. It's about a queer relationship between a geologist called SAMHSA and a Catalan woman.

called Boulder. She is the Boulder in question. And they, Boulder is working as a chef on a boat and has a free lifestyle where she doesn't really want to settle down. But she meets this woman, Samsa in Chile when she's on the boat. And they have this very kind of messy, passionate relationship. And then Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik. So they move to Reykjavik and they kind of settle down. And the book is really about how Bolshe is really about how Bolshe is, can't really settle down. She doesn't really have it in her to settle down and Sampsa wants to have a child

and it's sort of like a kind of messy relationship exploring life when one person doesn't really want to do the traditional thing. It's a nice, a quick, easy, poetic because she's a poet. The writing's very beautiful. Did you read it en route to or from Iceland? I actually read it in the camper van

that I was in Icelandian. So you were in transit when you read it? That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not a book I'm going to be talking about for the rest of my life, but it is a book that I'm very glad I've read. How's that? Yeah.

That's very good for the rest of my life. That's a new category that we ought to really preserve that. Is this an all your life book? Yeah, I like it. It's not an all your life book, but it's a book to savour the sentence by sentence. And I would read it, but actually I think that we've got lots to crack through. So if you want to have a short burst of something beautifully written about kind of love, desire, identity, that kind of thing.

I think you'll enjoy it. All right. So that is Boulder by Ava Balthazar, and you've answered my questions. So let me now push on to my first book. A lot of people ask me, Andy, how do you find books to read? Where do you get recommendations from? Andy, where do you get books to read? How do you find them?

How do I find them? Thanks, Nick. Well, it's a good example here. a novel called The Guilt Kid by James Curtis, which was published nearly 100 years ago, and is available right now, and has been available for about the last 15 years, in fact, from London Books Classic. So it's easy to come by. You can order it direct from them or from wherever you get your books.

And I found it because the lovely Clay Pipeipe Records label, which is one of my favourites, put out, a mini CD in an edition of 100 copies of Angel Pavements by D. Rothon, which is music inspired by London novels from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. By the likes of Patrick Hamilton, who we've covered on that listed, and James Curtis, it said in the sleeve notes. And I thought, well, I haven't heard of James Curtis, right? there's my recommendation because I love the music

so I thought okay I'll I'll give this a go oh my goodness all I'm going to do if this is your sort of thing this is the sort of thing for you I'm just going to read you the opening few paragraphs I think everyone listening to this will immediately know what kind of book they will be letting themselves in for the room pale grey light filtered through the curtains into a dingy furnished room. On the back of a Windsor chair hung a coat. The wash basin was

full of dirty water and by the bed stood a slop pail, on the top of which floated a few rapidly disintegrating cigarette butts. On the bed itself lay a young man. His hands were interlaced behind his head and through his half-shut eyes he was staring up at a patch on the ceiling where the plaster in falling away had left the beams exposed. His body was inert, resting, relaxed. The front of his blue shirt was soiled with fallen cigarette ash, and the armpits were dark with patches of sweat. From outside in the street came the sounds of the boys calling the evening papers, and the steady tramp of homeward-bound wage slaves. The light, high-heeled taps from the shopgirl's feet mingling with the heavier, tireder tramp of the men.

A knot of children were wrangling at the corner. The sound of a motor horn drifted in. The man thought idly. That horn was blown by a green-badged taxi-driver. There was nothing remarkable about the deduction. He had recognised the pitch of the horn and knew that all London taxi-drivers wore green badges dangling on their coats.

There were a lot of taxis in the quiet streets and squares behind Victoria. He picked up the book that was lying beside him on the soiled counterpane and began to read. Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely. Yeah, very good. That's my kind of holiday, everybody. And Anne.

Yes, ask the questions, Nikki. Is it available in paperback? No, it's a hardback, but it's at least if you buy it new, but it is a very bargain as £10 hardback and quite light to carry around. And Andy, how long is it? It is 237 pages. Well, that seems very reasonable.

With an excellent introduction and afterward. And where might be the ideal location to read this book? Oh, I think we've heard it there, haven't we? Dingy. In a 1930s dinsie bed sit. fagash all over the counterpane on a very hot day staying out of the sunshine

it's really gripping as a piece of classic left wing social realist condition of the working classes novel while at the same time being unput-downably fun it's full of

30 slang and type social archetypes and just a really lively, energetic book that's 100 years old. So there we are. The Gilt Kid by James Curtis, published by London Books Classics. When we come back, we will be heading into the heart of lightness in the countryside with another book from John Mitchinson.

So join us in a minute. My Day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink. Pre-K drop off. Then straight to the gin. Back home to meal press. before heading to the fire station for my shift. When the three alarm comes in, I'm ready. Celsius. Live, fit, go.

Grab a cold, refreshing Celsius energy drink at your local retailer, or locate now at celsius.ca. Enjoy Celsius responsibly. Designed for occasional energy boost, not as part of your daily diet. Please adhere to recommended serving limits. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if?

Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visitwayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Welcome back. In this half of the backlist is summer reading 26 special, we will be talking about Laurie Lees as I walked out one midsummer morning, Flashlight by Susan Choi, and the Palm House by Gwendolyn Riley. And just before the break, we were in the heart of the metropolis.

John, where are we now? We are in 1930s. Still in the 1930s, but in a different part of Europe altogether. This is the remarkable, and yes, it is a first-person narrative, I'm sorry to say, but it's a memoir rather than a novel. Chuck it out, oh, that's fine. It's a memoir. A lot.

Laurie Lee, famous obviously for Sider with Rosie, a great and I still think slightly misunderstood book because it was on the sort of O-level reading list for many, many years, but it's a much darker and more complicated book than I think people give it credit for. What happens after Sider with Rosie, the 19-year-old Laurie Lee walks out of the village of Slad, where that book is set, to basically, with a violin under his arm,

he wants a stick of hazel in his hand, he walks to Southampton because he wants to see the sea. He's never seen the sea before. And actually one of the lovely things about this book is not just, as you discover, he ends up in Spain. But it's not just Spain, but it's also London and the south of England from the point of view of somebody who is living an itinerant life sleeping in fields. And there's an extraordinary scene where he talks about that lanes are full of people walking, unemployed. people just walking and living and he takes up with an extraordinary tramp called Alf who's a proper professional gentleman of the road whose name is Alf and calls everybody else Alf and he takes pity on the on what he can see is

the 19 year old Laurie Lee who's hopeless and gives him a Billy can that he so he can make disgusting food and tea from anyway he ends up in London he ends up working in in restaurants and then that basically the the landlord employees of prostitute in the rooms above him and he decides he can't stand it anymore. So he decides where can I go and he hears that he has one, please can I have a glass of water is the one foreign language phrase in a foreign language he knows which happens to be in Spanish which he picked up through a book when he was a child. So he decides to go to Spain. He gets on a boat, ends up in Vigo. And really the book is his journey down through Spain, Madrid, right down to

and along the coast of southern Spain, when that is almost unimaginable poverty. And I mean, I guess we use the word backwardness. It was just not in touch with the rest of the world. It was like, and there were no tourists, nobody spoke any English, nobody knew who he was. And he's there at the time when just at the time that the civil war starts to break out. So you get a very interesting first person account of the beginning of the First World War. He's then shipped back to England and the book ends. He comes back and he realizes he actually cares about the Spanish people he's left behind

and he cares about the Republic and he goes back as Orwell did us so many bit and crosses the Pyrenees back into Spain and that's the story of another book. But this book, a couple of things. One ever said, English. It's great about England in the 1930s. It's amazingly, he's a poet, obviously, the language all the way through is continually arresting. But also it's an extraordinary portrait of Spain pre-Franco. I'm going to read you a tiny little bit, which seems to me to work, given the current weather we've got.

This is what he's in the middle of Spain and he's hot. The violence of the heat seemed to bruise the whole earth and turn its crust into one huge scar. One's blood dried up and all juices vanished. The sun struck upwards, sideways and. down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper. I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in, and because it seemed to be the only way to agitate the air around me. I began to forget what I was doing on the road at all. I walked on as though keeping a vow, till I was conscious only of the hot red dust grinding

like pepper between my toes. By mid-morning I was in a state of developing madness, possessed by pounding deliriums of thirst, my brain running and reeling through all the usual obsessions that are said to accompany the man in the desert. Fantasies of water rose up and wrapped me in cool, wet leaves, or pressed the thought of cucumber peel across my stinging eyes, and filled my mouth with dripping moss. I began to drink monsoons and winter mists, to lick at the first fat drops of thunder,

to lie down naked on deep-sea sponges and rub my lips against the scales of fish. I saw the steamy, damp-udded cows of home, planting their pink lily mouths in the brook, then standing knee-deep among dragonflies, whipping the reeds with their tassel tails. Images bubbled up green from valleys of shining rain and fields of storm-crushed grass, with streams running down from lime-pulled hills into the buttery swamps of flowers. I heard my mother again in her summer kitchen, splashing water on garden salads,

heard the gulping gush of the garden pump and swan's wings beating the lake. The rest of the day was a blur. I remember seeing the spire of a church rising from the plain like the jet of a fountain. Then there was a shower of eucalyptus trees brushing against a roadside tavern, and I was at a bar calling for bottles. calling for bottles of pop. I love the sound of that. That sounds brilliant. It's a great summer read and it's a lovely book.

Laurie Lee is a writer whose status I find endlessly interesting. Yeah, me too. Because if I said to you now here in 2026, Laurie Lee, what was he? Was he a novelist or a memoirist or a poet or a, you know? And why should we read him now? I'm not against reading him now. think. He's never come up on backlisted, has he? No. And he was so popular and is a really good

writer. And yet he, I don't understand in my own head where he fits. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, I think, because he's not as Gerald Brennan, another Englishman who went to Spain. He doesn't have that Bloomsbury connection. He was his own invention, I suppose. So I do with Rosie. The interesting thing about this book, although it's set in the 1930s, it was published, this is the first edition by Deutsche in 1969. So it's very much kind of recollection in, and I think it's Norman

it's Norman Lewis but it's easier. Sider with Rosie is like in the canon right, that's like the books that that's one of the books that people feel like they have. I think it has been in the canon. I think it's dropped from the syllabus now. Yeah. I think I think it's in the syllabus for years. It was in the syllabus for a long long time. And it's

as I say, that's a much darker, more interesting book than it appears. It's a really violent stuff in that. It's not, it's not, it's not the bucolic vision that people sometimes like to think it is. And neither, I have to say, is this book, this is a much darker, more interesting book about, both about being young and finding yourself in a completely, completely alien environment. But it's also, and I like, you know, I love Gerald Brennan, as you know, and the Spanish Labyrinth, I think, is the best book about the origins of the Civil War. This is also really, really good with homage to Catalonia.

I think all of those books can be read. So he's a sort of zeitgeisty writer for the 1930s, Laurie Lee. Why you would read him now, I don't know. Well, if you're on holiday going to Spain, surely. You're going on a holiday to Barcelona. All right, come on, let's get the question. Let's get the questions out the way. Let's do it.

How many pages is it, John? It is 252 pages. Well, that sounds reasonable. Paperback, a penguin modern classic. There is a Robert McFarlane introduction, which is a very good introduction. he says the very fair thing, which is, if sided with Rosie is a book that makes you think, oh, I just want to stay and want the same place and write about the same place and understand it,

quite true, this is a book about, oh, I just want to get up one morning and walk and walk and walk and have no ban and rules about that. So if, and if not on a beach, would you, would you read it whilst tramping the lanes of Suffolk or? Yes, I think exactly that. I think what you want is you want to have it in your, in your back pocket, a dog ear, a document is second-hand paperback that you pull out when you're sleeping under the stars, as we all do and dodging wild dogs. It's never been more

possible actually, but yes, okay. It's a genuine classic, I think. All right, but also, I recently went to Paris and I was reminded of when I went to Paris in the 1980s, before the internet, before the Euro star, and while France was still set on retaining French culture

and not allowing anglophone influences, such as the United States and pop music, The Weekend and all that stuff, I was reminded how, what it was like to, when you talk about a vanished world, a vanished world, where nobody spoke English or you didn't have a means of you didn't have a Google translate thing to just help you ask something. Yeah. You know? And when we did Norman Lewis on the main show, I remember thinking that.

And while you were talking, John, I was thinking, honestly, how would, Nikki, you've just been to Iceland. Would you have cared to have been in Iceland not knowing a word of Icelandic and with nobody able to speak English? No, it would have been very, very challenging. In fact, I sat on the plane coming back next to an elderly couple who spoke Urdu and no English and no Icelandic. And they managed to explain to me that they were going to Pakistan, but they had to spend the night. They were going via Edinburgh and happening there. Basically, it was all done by pointing. And it was absolutely because you've got no internet on the plane as well.

Do you know what I mean? So I also thought, well, I also thought, this is so hard. This is so hard because you've got to get off at Heathrow, which is a huge airport. There's so much difficulty, even just getting to where you need to get to, if you have no language understanding. We just assume as English people, don't me, that everyone can speak English and that's okay, Jack. But life must have been very, very different. But also, it's not even that, right?

That's classic US English arrogance. But it's the thought of my own. not having any means of accessing anything that strikes me as really revolutionary. That's why I was worried about this couple. I was worried about them in fear. I was like, how are you going to manage this? You know, and you're right, if I'd have gone to Iceland and not been able to speak and communicate, I probably would have been, you might have found yourself, you know, striking up more

relationships with people because you're having to kind of, you know, communicate. I remember when I was in France as a teenager and we had some, I had some. had a beautiful little summer romance with a boy who we just sort of pointed at the sun, Solet, you know, giggles because it wasn't much more, there wasn't much more that we could do apart from snog and the five words that we had in common. It was wonderful. So maybe there's beauty in that too. When I was in a, when I lived in France in my late teens, I just found it really boring, not being able to communicate at my normal high, witty, witty, standards and only being able to point at the sun and go,

oh, so lay. That's we, we say, you know, Ue La Bar. So, John, did you, do you feel, did you read it and feel, ah, the Arcadia we have lost forever, or did you read it and feel, I'm glad I could go with a phrase book in my back pocket. I do actually feel, what I did feel was we have created

this monster which is tourism which is destroying. Because I'm thinking, you know, there's this massive anti-tourist thing now in Spain and other countries because the tourism, which is bringing a lot of money into the country, is also destroying, destroying everything is, their economies are sort of being destroyed because everybody is now, you know, renting stuff out as Airbnb's. It's, so it's, it just, it struck me that it's not that long ago. The 1930s is what? It's a century ago.

isn't it, not quite a century ago. And I mean, but the change that has happened, that Spain is absolutely, I mean, I think you can still probably, you know, maybe in bits of the Carpathian mountains or some, something,

countries where tourists don't go to, you might find some of that. But it's, it's, yeah, it made me think, I love Spain, I love going there, but I,

you know, given the fact that we're, you know, we shouldn't be traveling because of, using fuel and not the curiosity about other cultures which is on one level a good thing has led to some something that I think is that we need we all need to look and say do we need to make these trips I think that's really true John the the ever-present menace of of tourism also I just I'm really struck by how difficult it is to get away from from everything now it's really

hard. Nicky there's no Glastonbury this year in 26 they're doing that year where they have a where they have a something to regenerate the land my first two three glastonbury's the thing that really differentiates them from now is I can remember when there were no phones

and once you entered the veil of Avalon you had no you were quite different you were yeah and but also you were part of the magic of it is that you were sealed off from the outside world and you would emerge blinking back into the light on a Monday

morning and find out that you know, famously John Major had resigned or, you know you had no, it was you were cut off. You were cut off, right? Right, I think it's time we went on to the next book. I think you're right. So

what the next book is, Nikki? It is Flashlight by Susan Choi, nominated for the 2025 Book of shortlisted, sorry, not nominated. International Booker? No, the booker. The straight up booker.

Yeah, okay, right. Straight up booker. Shortlisted for the straight up Booker Prize. And I'm just going to say, this is a big holiday read. You know, you want a big holiday read. This is the book. It's like a lit fiction book that you can get really stuck into. It was published in 2025 and it's one of those kind of big ambitious literary novels that you see in all bookshops.

and if you want to have a kind of big family saga, it's great. It began life as a short story, but she adapted it into a, I'm going to give you the pages already. Sorry, I'm jumping the gun, Andy, with the question, 450 pages of the book. Okay. Susan Choi has got an impressive record. She's American, Korean. She was a Pulitzer finalist and a shortlist of lots of other prizes.

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the book. It opens with this quite unforgettable. scene. It's set in 1978 and there's this 10-year-old Louisa. She's walking on the beach in Japan with her father who's called Cirque Kang. And he's this kind of awkward, gifted guy. He's very protective of her. And he can't swim. That's emphasised. He's carrying a flashlight, as in the name of the book, in one hand, and holding her hand in the other. And then very quickly, the next chapter jumps to the following morning. Louisa is found unconscious on a beach and he's disappeared. And everyone assumes he's drowned.

Nice. And that's the sort of premise. And then it goes back to detail his life in Japan. He's a Korean emigrate in Japan. And his wife, Louisa's mom, Anne, who's an American woman, who has another child when she's very young, Louisa's brother, Toby, who's this quite mad kind of guru hippie guy, which is a brilliant character. And then she gets together with Cirque.

And they go to Japan. he's an academic and he goes back to Japan for a year and then he goes missing. So actually what it does is it goes through their life when he goes missing and then it goes above and beyond. And it ends up being about really about North Koreans, the emigray experience of North Koreans in Japan, ethnic Koreans who lived in Japan and then in the war they, a lot of them were either went back to North Korea, they were sort of repatriated either back to North Korea or in this case.

and it is giving a bit of a spoiler away, some of them were kidnapped by North Koreans. If like me, you weren't aware of this, it unlocks a kind of an area of history, which is really fascinating. It's all about, you know, North, living in North Korea through the 80s and 90s and what that was like,

and then all the families that kind of, you know, family implications of this. And what it's like, obviously, to have a parent, a loss of a parent. And now, Louisa's mum, Anne, is quite an unwell she has. MS and Louisa isn't a particularly, you know, she's quite an angry child and later adult, having grown up in this kind of difficult situation. So there's lots of characters in there

who are complicated and the history has sort of shaped their individual lives and to not always a kind of beautiful way. It's a, you know, it's, it's, it's about migration, it's about displacement, it's about kind of loss, but it's just, it does that thing really well where it all these different characters, very interesting historical setting, wraps it all up well at the end, it's kind of globe spanning, it's just like a really good, you know, it's a really good sort of summer read where you feel like, okay, well written, satisfying.

I've got a question for you, Nikki. You strike me as a reader who doesn't need, it would be wrong to say that you need, but you do like something where I've noticed, you like it when you're getting information, right? then where you're learning something or you're finding something out that you didn't previously know about. Yes.

So, you know, fiction doesn't have to be useful but it's helpful to your enjoyment if you can feel it has some utility. I think that's absolutely true. So I read this and thought it was, as I say, I really enjoyed it. I liked learning about it. And then a friend of mine, Kate Pullinger, author,

But she said she found this a very Americanized stance on what happened during that time. And I thought, okay, that's fair. And she said, you know, there are other books that from perhaps a Korean or Japanese perspective that deal with this, she would say better. And I think to Susan Choi's credit, at the back of the book, she lists a lot of these books. Right. So she lists loads of books that you could read if you want to find out more about what happened during that time. And it did make me want to instantly look them all up and think, okay, I want to read more about this.

That's good. Okay. I want to know, in addition to its 450 pages, is it a hardback or a paperback at the moment? It's available in paperback right now, ready for your summer read. And I would suggest the place to read this is on the beach. No, no, we can't.

So the question was not, if not the beach. where on the beach. If not the beach, and you've already used up your transit voucher, right? This is the one where you start it in the bedroom in the morning while somebody else is making breakfast, and then you go and go, oh, I just want to read the next chapter, so maybe I'll take it by the pool,

and then maybe I'll do another few chapters later, because why not? So I think it's one that you'll just secretly squirrel yourself away to read for the next couple of days. All right. Thank you, Nikki. that is, that's excellent. And if you've, I was going to say, if you've not read Susan Choi before, who might you, I mean, she doesn't sound like she's very like the other hot Asian American writers like

Hanja Janiy Anagahara or Katie Kitamura. I think it's more like a sort of Jonathan Franzen or a sort of like, do you know what I mean? A sort of turn of the century sort of big, big scope. There's a writer I like who isn't Asian. American, but Lauren Groff does that kind of big. It doesn't sound like it's sort of Michael Chabon. It trusts its own narrative and its characters and its plot to deliver. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And the character is. And it tells, as I said, it tells it from all different characters' perspectives. It's a, I think the Guardian said it felt like it could have been published in the early 2000s because it had that sort of scale and scope. And indeed, she's, she's written, I mean, she was been, she was around in the early 2000. She was writing. I think American woman was published long. That must have been 2000, 2003. I've never read her. She's always just on the edge of my, you know, I have, and obviously we've had Jennifer Egan on the show. Jennifer Egan quotes on the back of the book. How much she likes her. Instantly bewitching, says Jennifer Egan. Susan Choi's fictional investigation reveals the writer at the height of her spectacular powers. Eleanor Catton likes it as well.

So yeah, interesting. Okay. Good, good, good, good. And so, so now we head, now we head into the terminal velocity of this episode. I am very, very quickly because I said I would in the space of about 30 seconds going to drop a few other recommendations. There's a new Willie Vlorton novel out called The Left and the Lucky. If you like Willie Vlorton, this might be his best book. And I commend that to you wholeheartedly.

I would also like to mention Alan Moore's The Great When, which is out now in paperback, the first of his long London quintet. The second volume is also out now. It's called I Hear a New World. And he's finished writing the third volume, which will probably be called Blow Away Dandelion. And he seems to be taking as his subject the relationship between. magic and British society from the 1940s through to the millennium. And I found the first volume both frustrating and magnificent, which is what I expect from Alan Moore.

And it's beginning to pick up, applaud it's from the likes of Susanna Clark now. So I think Alan Moore's transition from comic books into novels is a happening thing and again you don't need to like Alan Moore to begin to pick up the threads of this it's a really exciting

project and thirdly and finally in my quick recommendations there is an incredible book out now book called Gary Stewart I am from the honky tonks by Jimmy McDonough which I am to Andy's

you know you can trust Andy on these things. And he's telling you this is going to win all the prizes of the music books next year. Jimmy McDonner is famously the author of Shaky, Neil Young's biography. This will be his final biography

of a musician, probably his final book. He's been working on it for 40 years. It's a total labour of love. Gary Stewart died decades ago. It's got interviews with Gary, with his family. It is jaw-dropping. There is something on every

page that will make you go whoa this guy if you look at the sleeves of his records he looks like just another honky tonk guy he is the most feral

rock and roll country uh uh uh uh bevilly hillbillies meets charles Manson it's just I've rarely read a book that I've enjoyed so entirely about somebody about whom I knew nothing. So it's called

Gary Stewart. I am from The Honky Songs by Jimmy McDonough. And that brings us two. Go, go, go. Tell us about the palm house, Andy. Get the questions out the way. Okay, Andy, is this book in paperback or a hardback? Currently just a hardback. But it's how long is it? It's a little over 200 pages. You can read it and indeed we all have read it. I'll reread it in a couple hours. And, Andy, where would be a good place to read this book? You should read The Palm House by Gwendolyn Riley as she

is how she's spending her summer, which is following Morrissey round and going to Morrissey Giggs. Or alternatively you should read it in a palm house. I'm very fortunate. I live within warm distance of the palm house in Sefton Park. Or you should read

it hunched over a pint of beer in an East London pub. This is... With crisps. You will know listeners. If you're regular listeners, we are great fans of Gwendolyn Riley on Backlisted.

Here's the blurb about this one. Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. There's is a happy meeting of minds with long evening spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames where they share office gossip, reflect on their... teenage passions and lament the state of the world. A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies is how it's described. I mean, one of the things I love, love, love, love about Gwendolyn Riley's novel is how hard it is to tell anybody what they're about. I mean, I think we've all read this,

haven't we? We have. And I'm going to read one very little brief section which made me laugh and laugh and laugh. This is a thing that people don't say enough about Gwendolyn Riley's work, which is that she's tremendously funny when she's not being tremendously dark and even at the same time. So this is set around a magazine with the title Sequence with a new editor whose name is Simon Halfpenning and any resemblance to a particular British literary supplements is of course entirely coincidental. The new editor went by shove.

His given name was Simon, Simon Halfpenny. But as he told each member of staff at Sequence, and some of them he had to tell more than once, no one called him Simon. It was shove. Yes, shove. He was 30-ish. He had been managing editor of a sports title.

The board had moved him across. At his first editorial meeting, Shove, I'll use Shove, said that what he'd like to do was turn sequence into the New Yorker. A sort of London version of the New Yorker, he explained. Putnam, drawing certain conclusions about this man's familiarity with either magazine, stopped him there. He did have to stop him there, he said. to explain that that was quite a long way from what they did at Sequence, from what they had been doing for more than 50 years now. Sequence had its remit, he said,

and a loyal and sizable readership who valued it for what it was. Yeah, said Shove. That's great, of course we want to bring them along if we can. Well, they're already with us, said Putnam. That's the point I'm making. And forgive me, but people who want to read the New Yorker, Can read the New York, can't they? It exists. Unless you want us to start doing a London What's On Guide, is that what you mean? Or cartoons? Forgive me, I feel I can't have understood you. Do you want restaurant reviews in sequence? New sushi spots? Here Vic spoke up to ask if Shove had seen a certain piece in the latest issue. By Caitlin Ross. Did he know her work? Vic thought that this piece really showed sequence at its best. Serious.

learned, shop. That's great, said Shubb. As long as it's not boring, that's our motto now. Sure, said Putnam, but that rather depends on what you find boring, doesn't it? I'm not sure anyone's ever accused us of being boring, said Vic. That's great, said Shab. We don't want them to. But they haven't, said Vic. Well, exactly, there we are. We're on the same page.

I mean, okay, it's ghastly, right? It's absolutely ghastly people. But chronicled so well. Her ear for dialogue is unmatched. She is capable of leaving huge spaces in particular phrases. I was thinking there when I, there's a paragraph, he was 30-ish, he had been managing editor of a sports title, the board had moved him across.

Yeah. it contains whole worlds of information and politics there. Behind it, yes. So did you both enjoy the Palm House by Gwendolyn Riley as much as I have done? Yes. Although there are bits in it that are seriously difficult and unpleasant, the grooming by a comedian. But somehow the writing is so good.

her control is so complete that she takes you to places that you don't want to go in a sort of effortless way and although as you say ending what's it about in the end it's about everything and nothing and like all the great novels I mean it's it's she's got she's got a real I think she's got a real

extraordinary talent and she makes you look at the world in a Gwenden and Riley way particularly when it's to do with as she skewer so brilliantly the the pretence of the literary world. Nikki, what did you make of it? Because I can't remember if you read my phantoms,

which is her last novel. I read both of them, yeah. Yes, you did, that's right. And I enjoy both of them. I would agree it's not, it's more than the whole of the book. Like if you're looking at it as what happens in this book, as you said, you know, not a great deal,

but also lots. And it's not a book where you say, oh, and it's a story of this, this and this. It's about those scenes in the book. It's very much about the scenes that she creates. And the language that she uses, as you said, Andy, what happens behind the language as well? Because there's so much in it that is sort of shown but not actually said. And it's very, very, you know, like the grooming thing.

But she's not saying to you, this is awful. She's just saying this happened. And you are left to judge how it gets played out and what happened, you know, how you feel about it. but it's not wrapped up into this kind of clever. And at the end, wow, I've understood more about how the world works. It's not about that. As I said, it's about those scenes and about the incredible use of language and that makes you just feel like you're in them.

You're really in them. I think it's terrific. And I'd really like to, I think it's a book as well that I could probably read again in two years' time, having forgotten it all, and enjoy it all equally all over again. Okay, so I'm a great believer with her work that, It represents excellent value for money because in order to read it properly, this novel, you have to read it twice. And I guarantee that what you've read the first time will not be what you read the second time. I absolutely guarantee.

It's almost a cliche now to say that. I found that with her other novels and I really, really found it with this one. She says, I went to an event, she did it and she said, look, the thing is you could read this in a couple. I said the event, she said, you could read this in a couple of hours. but and I'd like you to but I'd also like you to know that it took me four years so

all those things that you're gliding past or over which I hope seems so easy have taken they're very considered literally literally thousands of hours of consideration

contemplation and I saw some criticism there's some criticism of you can tell she's getting into under people's skin because there's a little bit of a backlash going on where I've seen people saying I don't get the hype or I I'm I don't understand why people are gushing about this and I want to say well there isn't hype and they aren't gushing it's what happens when people like something and they tell other people about it right there's probably a writer those people like which they would think they recommend well that that's not it's not gushing is it it's it's it's

I think the last thing I'd like to say about her, and then we'll move on, is for such a literary writer, I think you need to have experience of types of art other than literature to really understand what's going on. I think she draws on, you know, of course, many novelists, some of them fashionable, some of them unfashionable. but I also think she draws on

music. Morrissey we mentioned she draws on stand up comedy in a very interesting way it's all to do with ear observation rhythm all those things right so yes that is the palm house by Gwendolyn Riley

it will cost you let's just say while it will cost you 1699 you're going to read it twice so you can half that it's like £850 per book So there's that. Should we just recap?

There's been some discussion on our Patreon about why the book is called the palm house. All I'll say is I don't really understand why my phantoms was called my phantoms and I don't really understand why the palm house is called the palm house. But that's part of the fun. I think she's giving vibes there, Gwendolyn, and then it's up to you to interpret it as he fits. And I mean, I suppose you could say there's a set, the sense to which the protagonist antagonists are fragile blooms who can thrive under glass. But if you break the glass, the emergencies on them.

There you go. I just wonder, given her Liverpool setting, Andy, whether, you know, it's just, there might be that little nod to the part. She absolutely denies it. But then she would. She would do, wouldn't she? So anyway, okay. Well, this was really fun.

This is great. This was really fun. If you want to read other theories about why the palm house is called the palm house, they're available on our Patreon and we've outsourced them to our dear listeners to come up with various reasons. Yeah, there's a fantastic community there of people who do love chatting about books. So if you're a bookish person and you'd like to have more shows from us, there's loads of, you know, as I said, there's our Booker Prize winning every month. We read a book from the Booker Prize.

and then we have the Patreon Readers show so there's loads of extra shows on there so you got Rushdie you've got Capote you've got Capote it's popping out all over at the Patreon it's popping on the Patreon so go to go to patreon.com

forward slash backlisted Well enjoy wherever and however you spend your summer and however long you take to read things and whether you read them in hardback paperback, audio book, ebook, scroll,

whatever. Braille. Braille, yes. Of course every, it's all available. We hope you have an excellent summer and we hope you have enjoyed this show. Any last message to listeners from my colleagues? Just enjoy.

Keep cool. Keep reading. See you guys. See next. Bye, bye, everybody. Bye, bye, bye, bye. Well, that was quite good. That was fun.