Backlisted - Winter Reading 2025

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Happy new year! We kick off 2025 - and Backlisted's tenth anniversary year - with our traditional Winter Reading episode, in which Andy, John and Nicky recommend a selection of favourite books to see you through the next few months: fiction and non-fiction, old, new and not yet published. "May you go farther sooner." Discussed in this episode and available to purchase from bookshop.org/backlisted, if in print. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today's format is a little different as we bring you a winter reading special in which we've each chosen books to recommend, some recently published, some not out until later this year. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people support the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And I'm Nikki Burch, Batlisted's producer. Hello everybody, welcome. Welcome to this episode. As John said, it's a special one.

It's also a special one because it's the first episode of 2025 and John Mitchinson, what is 2025? Why is it a historic year? It's astonishingly Andy. It is our 10th year. We will celebrate our 10th birthday, which in podcasting terms means we're kind of upper paleolithic I think. It's just like, it's really, before most people even knew what a podcast was, we were doing this. What is the average lifespan of a podcast? Six episodes, Andy.

It's six episodes. Not 230, you mean? Not. Okay. I have to say congratulations you two for managing to do this for 10 years. It's pretty epic. To quote the Pet Shop Boys, you really made a little go a very long way. And remaining friends Andy, let's go out there into the new year positive and declare our

friendship to the year. It kind of stretches it too far, doesn't it? No, no. Colleagues, colleagues. I think maybe, I think what we should do is still remain colleagues until the 10th birthday show and then, and then if it, you know, if we're still on speaking terms at that point, then we will acknowledge our relationship as friends. And Nikki, Nikki, we will invite you into the friendship circle. I know, right?

I feel blessed. Three pals. Roll on with them. Ten years. That'll be in November won't it? That's the actual anniversary. As I'm always saying, John was saying yesterday weren't you when we were recording Lock List is, my goodness we've covered some life changes in the course of this thing. Not least, I didn't need glasses when we started making Roundhouse pens. Neither did I. Didn't you? No. Good Lord.

I can't remember if I did or not. I suspect I probably did, but not quite the plus threes I've got now. Yeah, well you know, cubes of ice strapped to your face. All the better for reading. All the better for reading. Oh, I'm infinitely more civilised than I was 10 years ago. Okay, so as is traditional on our winter reading or summer reading specials,

we've got some new books to talk about or books that are new to us that we think you might enjoy in the months ahead or in 2025. And we've got quite a lot today. We've got to whip through about 10 books during the course of this thing. So you might wish to get a pen and a piece of paper or open the apps note on your phone to make a note of the books of this thing. So you might wish to get a pen and a piece of paper or open the apps note on your phone

to make a note of the books as they go. But just as a sneak preview, we have got novels and non-fiction titles from the following writers. Mark Bowles, Sally Rooney, Adele Stripe, Moon Unit Zappa, John Bowen, Rob Cowan, Bobby Short, Sadie Smith, Geoffrey Renard Allen, and Tim Roby. So that is a shelf full for you, or a stack, depending on which way you position them, horizontally or vertically. Shall I kick off?

Please do. Right. Put the egg timer on me, Nikki. Okay. Put the egg timer on me, here we go. The first book I'd like to talk about is called All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles, and it's published by our friends at the British indie publisher, Galley Beggar. It costs 10 pounds 99.

It's in the shops now, or in your library now, I hope. This book was recommended to me so many times in 2024 that I almost didn't read it because I thought I'll show you smart arses who think you know me. So I had a number of people who said to me, oh Andy, you'll love this Mark Bowles novel. It's like B.S. Johnson and Thomas Bernhardt. Will I though? Yeah. It's like B.S. Johnson and Thomas Bernhardt crossed with Marcel Proust. And indeed, Nikki, all those people were correct. I didn't read much new fiction last year, but this is probably

my favourite thing that I read. I'm not going to talk about it too much because as with the other books I'm going to talk about today, I've decided that it's better that you hear from them rather than me. So I'm just going to read in three of the four books I'm talking about, just going to read the opening or we're going to hear the opening of the book and if this sounds like your sort of thing it very much delivers. So here we go this is the beginning of All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles. One night I had lain down in bed ready to go to sleep. I put on the music as I always did but as I lay there in darkness it struck me that the lights

were still on in the bookshop. I had not switched them off. It was midnight, and I wanted to check the lights. I didn't want him, the owner, the corduroy waistcoat, the fuckweasel, to come in in the morning with the lights still on. Only the week before there had been a note on the desk saying I had left the place in a mess, a charge that was quite unjust if not an outright lie. But I had been upset by this note. It had taken the wind out of my sails. So I put on my slippers and went out into that cool September night. I remember that it was in fact unusually cool for September. For some reason I wore my slippers to go out. I'm not sure why I wore my slippers rather than my shoes, but I did. As if Oxford were

only a series of rooms, as if Oxford were only a series of rooms, as if Oxford wasn't quite a real city, but only a grand house through which one could walk at leisure beneath the remote and sparkling ceiling, and I walked out in my slippers to the bookshop to check the lights. In fact they were off. I hadn't left them on at all. I'd misremembered, or imagined leaving them on, as I lay in bed in the dark on the border of sleep with the soft notes falling and rising. And now, only half an hour later, I was stood outside the shop in the cool air, wearing my slippers, looking in through the window. I decided to enter. It was a simple mortise

look and there was no alarm. Imagine. You find it improbable, but it's true anyhow. I went inside and turned on the lights, and I sat at the desk by the window. I took down a number of first editions from the foreign literature section, including the tragic Schultz, whose drawings are dug from the corners of our dreams, and also a 1972 translation of Paul Celan.

Quote, inside the house, the drifting snow of what was left unspoken. Yes, inside the house, exactly. I had never read this book before, but each word glowed with meaning as it never would again. In fact, I have never since been able to fully access these poems, as if a gate had been placed in front of them, but that night the gate was open and I simply received them like a gift, a libation that irrigated my body and mind.

Only later did I discover that Celan killed himself by jumping from the Pont Mirabeau into the Seine, but this is of no importance. I sat there reading the book at what was well after midnight. Occasionally some drunk students would walk past and point or call out, but I did not listen. I sat there illuminated by my book. I sat there for three hours at the desk in the bookshop. They were hours stolen from sleep and as luminous and vivid as a dream.

It was not that three hours passed quickly, but that no hours passed. Time was excluded. It had to wait in the alleyway across the street like a beggar for me to come out of the shop. I can honestly say that this moment or rather this whole divagation from leaving the house in my slippers to sitting in the bookshop reading to returning to the house this was one of the most enigmatic and mysterious experiences

I have ever enjoyed as if directed by an occult hand, as if interpolated from another life, an experience like this that burns only once, unexpectedly, therefore burns forever, the light in the window still there, and me at the table even now, exempt from time and harm. the table even now exempt from time and harm. But all of this, which occurred over 20 years ago back in the 90s, is only by way of introduction, a kind of obscure and looping prelude to the man in the cafe, the small Italian place on Berwick Street. I used to go to that cafe every morning up until maybe a month ago now, the month of the sad referendum. That sounds absolutely brilliant. It does sound great. It is sensationally good, but you know that because you've just heard the opening of it, listeners.

It's called All My Precious Madness. It's by Mark Bowles, it's published by Gali Beggar. There you go. A first novel? It is a first novel, working on his second at the moment. I hope it wins a prize or two. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Nikki? Well, speaking of prizes, you know, last year when you look at all the sort of lists, end

of year lists, I did see that Intermezzo by Sally Rooney was on quite a few of those lists, particularly American lists. And you talked about it on our summer reading show, but you were sort of quite mysterious because you didn't want to, which was actually quite lucky because I believe you read it quite early, hadn't you? I read it early. And if anyone remembers that episode, as you recall, Nikki, two things. I didn't really talk about the book itself. I more talked about the publishing phenomenon that Sally Rooney is faced with every time she puts a piece of work into the world. And secondly, you asked me, didn't you? You said, will you, once it's published, will you show your hand and reveal what you

thought of it? So here I am now. OK, good. I'm going to ask you what you thought about it and say I have read it subsequently I've read all of her books like many people and this one I felt was quite different to the to the previous set and if you don't haven't read it it's the story of two brothers and it's their relationship with each other plus their other relationships individual relationships but really built around the death of their father who's just happened before the book starts. And it feels like a harder book to, I think, be getting, it's more complex than the other books, I'd say. And this one, she's sort of trying, I wanted to ask you what she's doing, what you think she's doing in terms of like structure of prose and writing, because I I just kind of read a

book kind of oblivious to it but afterwards I'm like oh she's doing something here but I don't know exactly what it is she's doing. Well I don't know, I mean I can give you what I thought. So did you enjoy it anyway? Did you enjoy it? I definitely enjoyed it when I finished it. I didn't always enjoy it when I was reading it but afterwards I felt really like actually I'm really, I finished it and thought you know that is a good book. There you go, there you go, got to finish things. You've got to finish things definitely.

Annoying, I'm so annoying aren't I? Anyway yeah go on. No no, you're always right and I've always taken that on board, you do have to finish things. I felt the Sally Mini book really intermezzo, it lingers, you know, it lingers afterwards. And I think it works the relationships, particularly towards the end, they work, they're complicated and she addresses, she addresses nuance really well. And you know, people really good characters. I mean, they are really, really complex depth of character.

I haven't read it. And often done just through language. It's really clever. But yeah, the bit I wanted to understand from you, Andy, is what did you think she was trying to do? I think she, well, okay, here I'm going to say it plainly. I really liked the book. I really like her previous books and I really like this one. And I watched so much of the critical response to it. And the thing it reminded me of is, I'm gonna say not in style at all,

but she has a very particular and original flavor to her work, okay? And it's a mark of how quickly and successfully that style has imprinted itself on the popular imagination that some people are already sick of it even if they've never read any of her books so i was very very aware that you come to Sally Rooney pre loaded right someone who really want to know better who really ought to have known better on social media going, I'm reading Sally Rooney for the first time. I wonder what all the fuss is about. And everyone else who's never read Sally Rooney bundling in there and going,

oh, thanks for saving me the trouble. You know, by all means, yes, stay ignorant people. That is the way forward, right? Don't find out what you think. Just adopt what other people think. But I would say the thing that it reminded me of, Nikki, was not in style, but because of that strong flavour, when someone like, say, Wes Anderson puts a new film out, all that happens is it becomes a litmus test for how much you, the viewer, already like

or dislike Wes Anderson, regardless of whether or not you have seen his work, because even if you haven't seen it, you've seen it in every sodding advert on TV. When you listen to a new Beatles album in the 60s, it was conditioned by how you felt about the Beatles. And I think it's, because I like Sally Rooney, I like this book, and the reason I like this book is it was more experimental than her previous books.

I thought it was a brave thing to do because I think she, I suspected her, maybe I'm gonna prove to be wrong on this. I thought she would lose readers as a result of that experiment, but it was a commendable attempt to position herself for a long career, even if it wasn't intended to be that. So I wish her all the best. I hope she shrugs off some of the

lightweights is what I think. What made me think is that she's appeared at the all these end best of year lists. So that means that, you know, she's doing the right thing and wherever you go, Sally, I will follow. You know, that's what I want to say. I'm interested in whatever you do. Nicky Burch has got your back, Sally Ringle. Yeah, no, but like I'm so interested in where you're going to go next and where you're going to take this. I'm chiming in and saying, I stuck with Bob Dylan for like 60 years. I'm here for you

too. He's taken some, he's taken some, some byways and byways. It's annoying, but I've, I mean, I've now got to add both of your books to my list. But it's your turn now. It's your turn now to burden us, John, please. Well, this is a book that's not published until this year. And this is published, I noticed, rather cleverly by White Rabbit Books on the 13th of February. So it's bass notes, The Sense of a Life by Adele Stripe. Now Adele, you will know, some of you will know, former guest on the show.

She appeared on the Gordon-Burn Alma Kogan show. She's a writer to, I think, brilliant books, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, about Andrea Dunbar and Ten Thousand Apologies, which she co-wrote with Lies Saoudi from The Fat White Family, a really good book about modern music and rock and roll and excess. But this is a memoir. Now there have been quite a few northern memoirs, Catherine Taylor's books, The Stirrings that I talked about last year, Rebecca Smith's memoir from the year before. I guess loosely this falls into that but I'm already in love with it from the opening

Quote the epigraph to the book which is the old factory sense is the sense that most strongly evokes memories of the past Well screw the past Sparks from their song perfume. Oh It's bringing so many things together, isn't it? So so sparks proofs You know, I mean the contents list is great. We've go full 7-eleven, Georgia, Sparks, Proust, you know, I mean, the contents list is great. Reeve Gauche, Fall 7-Eleven, Giorgio Beverly Hills, Dewberry, Tresor, CK1, La Maille, La Ode Issy. So each chapter is a perfume. It's it's really, really funny.

It's really sad in places. She writes beautifully. You know, she grew up in a in a Northern family. Her mum ran a hairdressing salon. And she her mum was really disappointed in Adele. Her sister went on to become a hairdresser, but Adele was just the weird, brainy one. She works in bars. She works on a sex phone line. She goes to New York.

She writes about all of it with affection. Her dad and her mum separate, and she writes about the death of each of them in, I think, really, really moving ways. It ends by her making her own perfume, which she kind of tries to pour every element of her life in. And of course, she says, in the end, she said it smells like something you'd buy off the middle aisle in Aldi. It's really horrible.

And her mum would have been massively, all the fear and pain and sorrow and difficulties of her life kind of. So, but I'm going to just read you a little bit because it gives you the flavour. Every Saturday morning, you rifle through the charity shop hunting for clothes, records and paperbacks. All goods are affordable there. It's a treasure trove of discarded clutter.

Collecting secondhand junk is a way of avoiding reality. Unlike what exists beyond it, your bedroom is an environment you can control. The walls are painted midnight blue. The air is scented with sandalwood incense. Postcards of Andy Warhol's soup cans are pinned to the door. Overcooked lava lamps bubble in each corner. Piles of books about New York in the 1960s are stacked by your crumpled bed.

There are heaps of spent clothes and a dusty chest of drawers with empty deodorant canisters, used tissues, and-meant bottles of perfumes littered on the surface. The young woman you have become is not the variation your mother had hoped for. After much argument and an act of desperation, she permitted you to attend art college so you could finally join in with the freaks. She is often confused by the men's suits you wear, your big boots, the unlistening music you enjoy, the militant left-wing views you've cultivated, your belligerent

attitude and general character. It is far too removed from her. The separation between you both is another problem to comprehend on top of her own marriage. The apron strings have finally been severed. Why can't you be more like the salon girls, she asks, bubbly and loud, at very least normal? Is there something wrong with you? What will my clients think? I may love you but I don't have to like you. The only person who comes to your defense is your father, who was another square peg in a round hole in the 60s. Like Mark Bolan, he was recruited as a John Temple boy with the perfect physique to model their mohair suits, which were made for sharply dressed mods. John Temples and their tailors nicknamed him King Charles due to his handlebar mustache and kitted him out from their lead store in exchange for catalogue modelling.

When your father looks at your clothes, he says it reminds him of times past, and unlike your mother, he's not ashamed of the adult you're becoming. Like most of your friends, you wear malodorous Afghan coats, knitted tank tops and platform shoes of the recently deceased. Even after washing these 50p clothes, smell of the odours of others, or perhaps multiple owners, you spray Tresor under the armpits to eradicate the odour of all wearing. Apricot Blossom, Lilac and Rose, Lily of the Valley, Iris and Jasmine, Heliotrope, Vanilla, Sandalwood amber, musk, a trace of bergamot. No matter how much of the fragrance you spray on your clothes, the grotty underlying tang of strangers perspiration is immovable.

It is a perfume that will always remind you of this upside down year. Oh, that's, it's good. It's a very, very good book. It is great. I can confirm that. I can back John up. That sounds great. It's a very very good book. It is great I can confirm that. Have you read it? I can back John up I've read it because and I'm going to be interviewing Adelle Stripe on Monday the 24th of February at Waterstones in Liverpool about this book. What's the book called and when's it coming out? It's called Base Notes by Adelle Stripe published by White Rabbit Books. You could probably pre-order it now can't you? You can definitely pre-order it now I would suggest it's an excellent Valentine's Day gift for someone. Oh of course, it's the sweet smell of success. My turn now, I'd like to talk about a book that

I talked about on Lock Listed recently, Earth to Moon by Moon Unit Zappa, the daughter of the late Frank and Gail Zappa. If you would like to hear what I thought about the book and why it's good, you can always subscribe Lock List on the level and hear me talk about it on there. I don't want to repeat myself but because this is a New Year's show I thought I would like to play the opening of the audiobook which Moon Unit reads herself which I found very moving and I think listeners will do too and if nothing else take her closing words from this as a set of New Year's resolutions and you won't go wrong. So here we go. This

is the beginning of Moon Unit Zapper's Earth to Moon. Growing up, I was just like you. I had a rock star for a dad, was told to call my parents by their first names, had two invisible camels for playmates, and daydreamed about my future following in Frank's footsteps by helping people and making them laugh. Only I'd be dressed like a nun. I admit I was also tempted to be barefoot and in charge behind the scenes

like my fertile bossy mother. 100 babies sounded about right for my temperament since I already adored helping Gail raise my three younger siblings. 97 more of what I already loved seemed like a dream. Plus, that episode of the little rascals where they took care of all those babies by gluing them to the floor and feeding them cake

really cracked me up. Of course, the children acquisition details were hazy since I didn't want to have a husband who wants a man who leaves all the time and stays away too long. Luckily, Destiny had something else in mind for me altogether. As they say, man plans and God laughs.

Or gives you an unconventional celebrity family and a random hit single when you're not even a musician. Or psychologically, emotionally, professionally, and legally kicks you in the taint until you rock bottom your way back to life among the loving living or whatever the expression is. But I'll get to all that. I got my first journal when I was five, for Christmas.

Then every year after, I'd get a new one. They were hardbacks bound in black leather with gold embellishments on the cover and along the paper edges. So fancy. These books felt important. I believed I had a responsibility to do excellent work in them, to match their external beauty and honor the dead trees I held in my hands, a concept my mother had recently illuminated, along with explaining that hamburgers were deceased cows.

Plus, the diaries were from Gail and Frank, my mother and my father, with the inscription to me in his handwriting. So I put undue pressure on myself to turn these blank nothings into weighty somethings, as I saw my idle dad doing on his large butter-colored music paper. When I wasn't writing short stories about my imaginary camels, Tamershi Dween and Sunini, or about aliens or ballerinas or nuns, or alien ballerina nuns, I'd report on the happenings in the house or the world at large. I was political and wrote a letter to President Ford

to ask him to stop men from clubbing baby harp seals. I was ambitious and practiced signing my autograph in various handwriting styles. I was complimentary and wrote a letter to Tina Turner to let her know she was almost as good a dancer as me. I was boy crazy for Sean Cassidy and scrawled my married name, Moon Unit Cassidy, everywhere in loopy cursive. I used my journals as a secret best friend I could tell anything to. I'm sad. I wish my dad would take me with him to Europe. When I still lived at home and had no privacy, I'd write in code about really secret stuff, so I had somewhere safe to be the real me,

to vent my feelings with impunity or dropinesses. As time went on, I loosened the reins on my dad comparing and perfectionism in my journals. And in life, I had no choice. Rightly or wrongly, I believed I would never be as good as my dad, so I had to learn to live with plain old me. This book is a collection of memories, reflections, actual journal entries, and some overheard stories, as I recall them.

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned. I partly wrote this memoir as a reclamation to tell my version of what happened in my childhood and early life as a gift to myself, as a map that charts how and where I ended up as an adult. I also wrote this book to entertain, so I hope you find something funny or of value here. If you choose to only listen to this wee introduction, I hope you can embrace my big takeaways. Love yourself, love yourself, love yourself.

Growing up doesn't end when you become an adult. Outrage is the appropriate response to deception and betrayal. The way out is through. Make peace with what hurts and head towards joy. Run with the people who love you, lift you and make you laugh. Write your future with the ink of today.

May you go farther sooner. XX moon. What's beautiful, that's a fantastic book. Very moving, very funny. It's sooner. XX Moon. What's beautiful about that, it's a fantastic book. Very moving, very funny. It's called Earth to Moon. It's by Moon Unit Zappa and it's published by White Rabbit. Nikki, you're up. Okay, I want to talk about a book, a very backlisted book.

I think backlisted fans will like this book. It was sent to me. I actually don't get many books sent to me, which is not a plug for people to send me books because I can only read a certain amount a year. But I did get these, a lovely- Be careful of what you ask for, Nicky. Lucy Skolls did send me a nice, because I read something, one of her books out

and she was very grateful, so she sent me some more. And one of them was- Now she commissions and republishes books for McNally Editions, doesn't she? That's correct. And we talked about one of their books, didn't we, on the last, on the summer reading show. Right, yes, that's right.

Rhyme Journey, I talked about. Anyway, so now, there we go, I'm reading another one. So maybe it is useful if you send them to me. I was gonna, yeah. Damn! Damn, yeah. Yeah, it is, yeah, well done, Lucy. Come on, you influencer. Let's hear you.

Okay, so it's called The Girls, and it's by John Bowen, and it was written in 1986, and has been republished by McNally Editions. And I'd never heard of John Bowen. And she said, oh, you might like this. She was right, I do like it. There's a beautiful blurb on the back,

which I think describes it better than I can. It's from Michelle Slung in The Washington Post. The trappings of this sly little novel are like the crumbs leading Hansel and Gretel to gingerbread danger. For people who like Myra Breckinridge as well as Miss Marple, fans of Beryl Bainbridge, Russell Green and Patricia Highsmith, those who feel Barbara Pimmish on some days and Stephen Kingish on another. What this book is, is two women who live together in the 70s in a village and they're a couple but they're sort of a couple that no one really talks about them. They just live

together. They're like friends who live together, you know, that sort of thing. And they run a gift shop and the book is, he says, John Bowen says he based the house where they live on his house where he grew up because the whole thing is very much around this house and the gift shop and there's lots of lists and descriptions and it's very twee and it's very safe but then the women are Janet and Susan, the girls, they're known as the girls in the village maybe you've got some girls in your village, John and anyway, the girls...

But at one point one of the girls decides she wants to go and find herself. She's a bit lost, she's a younger one and she goes, she's like, I'm going to go to Greece to find myself. And this sends the other one into a bit of a sort of tizzy. What's she doing? Is she going to come back? What's happened? This is our life, you know. Susan is the one who goes off to Crete, has a terrible time and wants to come back the whole time. She's only there for a week. But Janet's on a bit of a tizzy. She goes to a kind of craft fair and meets, basically meets a man, just a friend, just a friend, but they end up having having sex that one night. She's never done it before. You know, why not? Basically gets pregnant and they have a baby. The girls have the baby and things then go kind of a bit macabre

because the girl's life is the most important thing and now the baby as well. And this man is sort of trying to get involved. You know, things unfold in a kind of quite a sort of dark way but the great thing about it is everything is still lists of things and neat little things and everything is still kind of very village life. May I point out-

Sounds very good. If you are interested in horror in a folk village setting, which we all are, of course, John Bowen, when you said his name, Nikki, I was thinking, John Bowen, John Bowen, I know that name. Why do I know that name? He's written like 12 books, hasn't he? Ah, but he's also a TV playwright and he wrote the script for one of the great folk horror TV plays, Robin Redbreast, which anyone who's seen Robin Redbreast, which is really, really spooky and unpleasant in exactly the way you've just described that novel as being.

and unpleasant in exactly the way you've just described that novel as being. So that's gone on my list. This is a nightmare, isn't it? Honestly, this show is a nightmare. We're just gonna have ever more bigger TBRs. But anyway, what's it called? It's called The Girls by John Bowen and McNally Editions and it's really fun.

Give us the opening paragraph. It does give a clue the opening paragraph to what happens later on. Oh well, that's OK. The septic tank is in the shrubbery at the bottom of the garden. It is covered with concrete slabs over which the cottonista has been trained. The shrubs of the shrubbery surround it and one must assume feed off its contents. Hey, you have me at septic tank.

I know, that's pretty good. There's a metaphor, there's a metaphor of working hard. Great. Okay, that sounds fantastic. John, what have you got for us? So, not a Septic Tank, a non-fiction book, and it's called The North Road by Rob Cowan. It is published by Hutchison Heineman. It is out in April,

and it is an exploration of the North Road that connects London with Edinburgh. So the kind of central archery, not just of modern Britain, but of Britain right back to sort of prehistoric times, which is really the point of the book. If palimpsestuous is a word, that's what this book is. It's an attempt to explore the road in all its dimensions, the idea of a road and of time and of going forwards, it's an exploration of his own childhood. His family come from Doncaster originally and a small mining town called Bentley. If you like Robert McFarlane, who's already given this book a quote, you will

love this. I think he kind of just has something that there's a, he writes personally in a way that I think is, that totally works. I loved his book Common Ground. I've been very excited about reading this one. I love the idea of books that have this kind of structure. I'm going to just read a little bit and you'll see the quality of the writing. You can do whatever you want to call these, auto-fiction, psycho-geography. I think we all know what we're getting.

It's a book of fragments. It's described as kaleidoscopic by his publishers, which is pretty, I mean, not wrong, but I think it's the way he weaves his own life, his relationship with his own children, his relationship with his parents. There's a wonderful bit at the end where he takes his mum up. They find that right at the top of the country in Caithness they found a woman who, through the Matrilillian line, a beaker woman, 5,000 year old grave, is actually related to his mum. So they go and visit her grave. It's quite moving, quite lovely, but here is the prose, which I think is what sets it apart.

Imagine, for a moment, a topographical map of Britain. Place a finger on London, then draw a line north to Edinburgh, avoiding major hills and mountains and you'll be tracing a road, an old road in the country's longest, a remarkable road with its roots in time out of mind. One that in places traces tracks laid down as far back as the Mesolithic, a road that today connects two nations and links 18 counties including the largest and smallest in England, a road bookended by frenzied capitals that stitches together sprawling cities and suburbs, satellite developments and rural backwaters, a road that cuts along coastlines and through fields and flatlands,

between once grand towns and deserted villages, over lost graveyards and under new supermarket car parks. While not perhaps Britain's oldest, this haunted and haunting assemblage of prehistoric desire path, ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim route, turnpike, coach road, A road and motorway has surely been its most influential and important. A driving force, facilitator and fulcrum in the long story of these shores, and at times by extension the world for the last 2000 years and counting.

Now imagine closing in on that map, stepping into it. Imagine its earliest origins around you. See meandering tracks weaving through post-tundra woodlands. See them widening and deepening. See their significance increasing as our species conversely shifts to sedentism. See societies forming, agriculture, farming, the creation of myth and ritual.

See settlement and segmentation. See, the creation of myth and ritual. See settlement and segmentation. See stockpiles and surpluses. See new lines being drawn over old and the name of trade and exchange. See the swift arrival of their twins, possession and war. See tracks being forcibly conjoined, straightened, widened, heightened to a long power line laid out in stone. See it carrying emperors and the enslaved,

connecting forts and fledgling cities. See it named, numbered and known across the seas. See it scarred and etched with the countless footprints of the unremembered as centuries wash over it. See it regreening, flooding, overgrowing. See it surfacing and echoing again with foot and hoof and wheel. See it spreading the word of God, kings, and revolutionaries burning with their righteous ideals.

See it bringing battle, plague, death. See it delivering untold freedoms and subjugations. See the mass movement of people driven by desperation and by desire. See it pumping lifeblood throughout this land, becoming the major artery of a nation again, blueprinting future patterns of flow and commerce, spinning the wheels of mass production and industry. See it empowering and arming an empire once more,

enabling the export of unchecked human ambition, suffering and the want of things beyond limits across oceans and into new worlds. See all of this and you will never look at this highway the same way again. Wow, beautiful. It's a good book, really good book. The North Road, Rob Cowan. What's it called? The North Road, Rob Cowan. What's it called? The North Road, Rob Cowan.

The North Road, Rob Cowan. Hutchison, Heinemann. Coming up. Coming up. Coming up, they say. These are previews, this is good. When we come back, we're gonna be talking about Bobby Short, Zadie Smith,

Geoffrey Renard Allen, and Tim Roby, but. Now time for a quick advert break. Okay, we're back. We're back. Well done everybody, we're over halfway through. And it's my turn now. And I am going to talk about an incredible book called Black and White Baby by a man called Bobby Short. Now, American listeners may well have heard of Bobby Short, but I'm pretty certain people in the UK won't know who Bobby

Short is. So Bobby Short was born 100 years ago this year. He grew up in Danville, Illinois. In his class at school, he was in the same class as both Donald O'Connor from Singing in the Rain and Dick Van Dyke. Dick Van Dyke who is still alive, if God willing he'll be 100 this year. So imagine that you're in the same class as Dick Van Dyke, Donald O'Connor and Bobby Short. Now, Bobby Short is remarkable for several reasons. If you listened to our Christmas lock listed on Patreon, you will have heard at the end of the show,

him playing the piano and singing White Christmas by Irving Berlin. And at the age of nine, Bobby Short was a vaudeville act. He dressed up in a white tie and tails and he went out to a mixture of rich people's houses and speakeasies and he played the piano and sang. And Black and White Baby, his memoir, was published over 50 years ago in the early 1970s and it is an account of those years as a child star. The book it most reminds me of that we've covered on Batlist is Harpo Speaks, where Harpo Marx's account of what it was like to play the halls at the turn of the century is now a valuable historical resource and so it is with this Bobby

Short memoir. It's the most remarkably evocative piece of writing. It's certainly my favourite old book of the year. The fact that Bobby Short went on to record for Atlantic Records in the 1950s, then went on to have a 35-year residency at the the Cafe Carlisle in New York City. He recorded songbook albums of Cole Porter songs, of Noel Coward songs, of Rodgers and Hart songs and guess what? He was personal friends with Cole Porter and Noel Coward and Rodgers and Hart. He played for presidents, he played at inaugurations. He had the most extraordinary life and career.

And this memoir, Black and White Baby, is well long out of print. It would be expensive for me to buy it secondhand and it's never been published in the UK. Fortunately, you can borrow it for free from the internet archive, which is how I read it. If you're not already a member of the Internet Archive, you really ought to be.

And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna read the opening of this book. What I'm hoping is some enterprising publisher listening to this, as does occasionally happen, will think, hmm, that sounds good. We ought to bring that back in a print and then lots more people can read it. So it's time for me to read to you the opening few paragraphs of Black and

White Baby by Bobby Short originally published in 1971. where my family always lived on a pleasant street in a pleasant neighborhood where the houses had front yards and backyards, with flower beds and vegetable gardens. Many of our neighbors were white. This book is a collection of memories from those days and from the two years when I was a child star on the vaudeville and nightclub circuit out on stage in a white suit of tails playing the piano and singing. Sell it, sell it, sell it, smile, smile, smile. That was my manager in the wings, just out of sight off stage. Some of my memories are bitter, some are barbed, but most, when all is said and done, are sentimental recollections about my family, my hometown and my childhood stint in show business. My family on both sides have been part of the great migration that beat it out of Kentucky and

Point South at the turn of the century moving up into the mid-western states. They were small town and country people who did not choose to head for the melting pots, the big cities with their vicious racial and labour conflicts, negroes against rednecks, hunkies against polaks, dagos against krautheads against micks against kikes and on and on and on. Americans probably have more derisive names for their fellow citizens than does any other country in the world. My relatives chose to settle in Danville, a town that was classically mid-western. It was Heartland, USA, predominantly white, predominantly Protestant, a town founded on the site of an Indian village called Pankashore and renamed Danville after one Dan Beckwith, a trader who built a cabin there in 1824. Goodbye Pankashore,

welcome oh pioneers. This was prairie country, Lincoln country. In the old section of town near the river there still stands the house with its balcony from which Lincoln spoke during a campaign tour. All told, Danville was an attractive town. Most people think of the Ku Klux Klan as a strictly southern outfit. But in the 1920s and early 30s, the Klan was very strong in the Midwest. And they took off against anyone who wasn't white, native-born,

and Protestant. In other words, Negroes, Jews, Catholics, and the foreign-born. Danville had a branch of the KKK. It was no secret. Their activities were well publicised in the Danville commercial news, after dark rallies in open fields

with large electric lit Ks in red, white, and blue. Prayer meetings in a Danville park with scripture lessons, onward Christian soldiers, and nearer, my my God to thee. The public was cordially invited to attend, barbecued meat and refreshments were served, a three-day Clantacqua entertainment and speeches was held at Lincoln Park just a few blocks up the street from where we lived and a statewide reunion was held at the Danville Fairgrounds with special trains to accommodate the out-of-town Klansmen something like 15,000 of them. I've been told since

that some local people opposed all this but on the whole the Klan was accepted the Danville KKK seemed to be fairly content with prayer meetings and barbecues. I know of only one incident when they resorted to terrorising tactics. In 1936 or 37, when I was away from home on my show business stint, a cross was burned on the front lawn of one of our neighbours, a coloured man who was highly successful in his business ventures and, sin of sins, was rumoured to have a white mistress. Either of these facts alone would be mighty upsetting to any self-respecting white supremacist. But when I came back to Danville after my two years on the road, the fiery cross on the neighbours lawn was never mentioned and I was dumbfounded when I at last heard about it.

25 years later. This hadn't been the silence of fear fear but the silence of indifference. Clan activities had evidently been dismissed as nonsense and forgotten. And can I just read the very end of this chapter because it's so good. We were raised in the old time Protestant ethic as our parents had been and their parents before them. Hard work never hurt anybody. Children should be seen and not heard. Father knows best. Mother knows best. Pay your own way. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. The road to heaven is thorny. The road to hell is a

primrose path. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh the way. God's will be done. Amen and amen. And as Midwestern Protestants we also fell heir to Midwestern Protestant prejudices. We too believed that Jews and Catholics were taboo. Judaism was a mysterious somehow foreign entity and Catholics were different. Actually I didn't know what a Jew was until I was about 11 years old and went into show business. At that time I also got my first inside view of Roman Catholicism. My managers, who were Jewish, enrolled me in a parochial school in Chicago, an event that provoked a number of phone calls to my mother back in Danville, serious phone calls from her friends.

Myrtle, do you realise your son is in the hands of nuns? Curiously, this prejudice did not extend to coloured Catholics. Our neighbours, the Taylors, had a daughter who became a nun. The Butler's were Catholics, and so was the Hughes family, whose daughter Gertrude, a roly-poly little girl, who wore her hair in sausage curls and sang Shirley Temple songs in entertainments around town.

It was white Catholics who were different and foreign. But there it was. Negros have been trained as Protestants in centuries past, our American education after all usually having been undertaken by ardently Protestant whites. We had subscribed to the whole programme, the theology, the code of manners and the taboos. We were the negro minority of the Protestant majority. We were full-fledged wasps except for that one insurmountable difference, colour. And here our white brethren drew the line. Republish that someone, it is amazing. And that's just the introduction.

The accounts of doing things like being brought on stage at a Cab Calloway concert in the early 1930s to play the piano as a nine-year-old or playing in speakeasies, it is just mind blowing. It's so, so, so wonderful. The good news is, if you don't mind reading it on a screen, you can download it right now from the internet archive. But I do hope if anyone listening to this can figure out a way to bring this book back into print. Do it, do it, do it.

Nikki, what have you got? Okay, I wanted to just talk about a book that was published in 2023, massive big bestseller. So you know, many of you will have thought either read it or thought, oh, that's not for me. It's the Zadie Smith, The Fraud. Ah, because people, like we were saying earlier, like we're saying with Sally Rooney, people have, whether they've read her or not, they've probably have their view about Zadie Smith, right?

That's right, that's right. So I waited until it was in paperback because it's, you know, some books, you wanna wait anyway. So I read it recently and I just wanted to talk about it because I'm guessing you two haven't read it, have you? Is this the historical one? Historical. Historical.

I've seen, I didn't read it, but I have seen her talk about it, yes. The reason I want to talk about it is I think it will appeal to people who perhaps have a different set of people. So if you are someone who is interested in historical fiction, if you are interested in Dickens and you are interested in reappraisal of Victorian England or Empire, the British Empire from a historical fiction where it looks at people's opinions and also people's thoughts in the day and it looks at perspectives not just from England but also from the Jamaican experience,

then I think you will be interested in it. It's very literary in that Dickens appears as a character in it, as does Thackeray. These are minor character, but one of the main characters is a writer who was a writer in Victorian England called William Amesworth, and he is sort of at one point once outsold Dickens and that's his sort of claim to fame and then he gets more and more annoyed because Dickens gets more and more successful as he kind of goes off and doesn't do very well. And it also follows a real life court case that happened, hence the fraud, which is somebody fraudulently or claiming to be a descendant or someone who died to try and inherit their fortune. So it's got

this kind of very, very true to historical facts that happened, but then it was reimagining how people might have behaved or what they might have said in true historical fiction. And what's really interesting is it sort of reappraises, I think, Dickens' opinion on slavery potentially as well, so so has thoughts on that. The main character is a woman called Elizabeth Touchet, and she is around all these writers and is always given sort of asked for advice, but is never given the sort of the props to be herself considered of note and importance, so it's very much a sort of feminist look at Victorian England, as well as another main character is a descendant of a slave, Andrew Bogle,

and his journey from Jamaica and his experience in England with his family. That sounds right up my street. I think it really is. I have read reviews. I don't know, I think it's an ad. I'd love to talk about it with you more, but I think it's, I think you should think twice, is Lady Smith for me? If you don't think that, but you like this kind of thing, I think you should read it. You know, it's a brilliant example of spare a thought for the writer or artist or musician

or filmmaker who is consistently excellent because they lose the people who were excited when they were a novelty, but they struggled to gain the audience who might enjoy their more mature work because and yada, yada, yada, as we've been talking about, you know. Yeah, and the other thing I would say is, she is, we all know this, she is a phenomenally clever woman, right?

She is a very, very clever woman. I do think it benefits from a kind of reading this, but also listening and watching her talk about it. When I went to see her talk about this book last year, she said something that's really stuck with me and actually weirdly I wasn't expecting this but it's sort of of a piece with that Bobby Short passage I just read 10 minutes ago. Right, the thing that makes that Bobby Short passage work is it isn't one thing, you know, it's able to see different types of prejudice in different areas, different groups against one another

and different good elements and different bad elements. And Zadie Smith was saying, how do I feel about statues being torn down? She was asked about. And she said, I have a lot of sympathy with that, but it isn't as simple as that Because we're sitting in a building now, which is built by slave money, by our ancestors, who were so generous to us and to the people who would come after us to

provide an infrastructure of buildings and libraries and universities that allow us to foster a way of seeing the world directly in opposition to where the money came from to allow them to do it. And we have to be able to hold both those thoughts in our heads at the same time. And that is exactly what the book is about, I think. Perhaps my one criticism about it is it's very true to what actually happens, it's very true to the history and sometimes I think that costs the book you know because you're kind of you're going through the very long court case and you're going through

what actually happened but nonetheless. You said earlier it was challenging in a good way. Yes it is challenging in a good way. Yeah good okay so what's it called? The Fraud, Zadie Smith. All right, very good. And that's available right now in paperback. John, what have you got? So I'm going to talk about, I think, my favorite collection of short stories that I read in the last year, which is by the guest who appeared on our show with the Law

Siegel novel, where we had Nat Jantz, who's the UK publisher of, or will be the UK publisher of, that book later on this year, and Geoffrey Renard Allen, who's the UK publisher of, or will be the UK publisher of that book later on this year, and Geoffrey Renard Allen who was the guest and who is the author of a collection of stories called Fat Time and Other Stories which was published in the middle of 2024. These are really original stories. If you can imagine kind of a mash-up between Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, George Saunders, with a bit of Donald Glover and Atlanta thrown in, and then Octavia Butler as well. The first long story in this collection is set in an unnamed country where the character, who is white, is being hunted down by black militia, a black fascist state.

It's a brilliant story. But the great thing about this collection is you have no idea where it's going to go next. Suddenly you're in a story which brings together Francis Bacon, the painter, and Jimi Hendrix. He completely invents the fact that they were friends, but it's a really brilliant story. And then you've got Jack Johnson, the boxer, arriving in Sydney for his big fight to win the heavyweight championship of the world. Each of the book in a sort of kaleidoscopic way, I suppose, looks at what you might call dimensions of the black experience, but I think that just absolutely limits. This is just astonishing writing and I'll read you two

short passages. There's one story where the main character is Miles Davis, which I'm going to read from, but this is the Jimi Hendrix story and this is about Jimi Hendrix and music. He watches the song grow, full of wind and sky and dirt and water, coming and going, rising and falling, one heap of sound. He knows what inflections of the blues mean red house, blue rain, midnight lightning. Knows how to worry chords into the black shape of time. Knows how to anchor weight on a string and sink a barbed note into the muddy depths below, then bend that string and yank up a struggling catfish. Knows how to hoist the entire world to his ear, all

that he is listening. So if you like that kind of stuff, which I would say is extraordinary, properly literary writing, this collection is full of it. It's also intimately very funny. This is Miles, okay? You're supposed to like your listeners, be grateful for these ordinary motherfuckers because they buy your records and come to your shows. Fans, fan clubs, no. I wish I could club all these motherfuckers, clubber them. They take up all the space in the world, suck up all the air, crowd you into corners.

No motherfucker, I don't care if you like my music. No, I don't wanna meet your girlfriend or your wife. Take that bitch and get out of my face. Give me some room, some quiet time to myself. Can't you see I'm here drinking at the bar? I don't wanna see no fucking body. The one good thing about being on stage, the chance to be alone with motherfuckers

you want to spend time with. That's why I turn my back to these ordinary motherfuckers sitting out there looking at me, admiring me, wishing they could be me. Give me your money. I don't owe you shit. You should be eating crumbs out of my hand. Motherfucker, you wanna do something for me?

Here's what you can do. Cut your arm cut off your leg better yet Just slice your throat from ear to ear and die. Give me some room to breathe It's a great great great story I tell you what you've probably just dropped the MF bomb more times in one reading than we've done in the whole ten years of Batlisted there congratulations So, what's it called? It's called, Fact Time and Other Stories, Geoffrey Renard Allen. It is utterly baffling to me that this man is not published in the UK, but the e-book is available. You can order

it from Grey Wolf in the States. And I think I've already said this and I remain hopeful that I can keep this promise. I would love to publish him, because his novel, Song of the Shank, was also one of the best novels I read last year. But this collection is a great entry level, and I would put him right up there with Saunders. We nearly made it to the end, and it seems only right that we should end with this. It's slightly more lighthearted.

Well, is it lighthearted? Is it? Well, this book is called Box Office Poison, Hollywood Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Roby and what it really ought to be called is a century of Schadenfreude. If you, this is basically you get to have the history of Hollywood told not by its Oscar winners and its smash hits, but by its failures. The book opens with Intolerance by D.W. Griffith and ends with Cats, the 2019 musical adaptation, and in the process chronologically takes you through and gives you details about, for instance,

Freaks by Todd Browning, the magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles, Dr. Dolittle, the Rex Harrison starring musical, Sorcerer, Friedkin's remake of The Wages of Fear, which was a tremendous failure, the Hudsucker Pro proxy by the Coen brothers. Oh yeah, great. Speed 2, cruise control. Babe, pig in the city. I can never say this word, Synecdoche, New York.

Oh yeah. And as Tim points out, one of the reasons that film was such a flop is because no one knows how to say the title. Anyway. Right, so it's just such a ridiculously enjoyable. Tim Roby is a film critic. He can really write. He gives you the facts, he gives you the gossip, and he gives you his opinion of each of the films. He likes some things and doesn't like others, and his definition

of what constitutes a flop is very straightforward. How much money did this film lose? So films that we might think of as having been flops, like for instance It's a Wonderful Life, which was a flop on release, eventually made back its money through reputation and tv screenings. Waterworld by Kevin Costner's famous- Yeah, classic. Cursed. I'd like to see that, because it's supposed to be so expensive.

But it didn't lose money. It just about broke even. So all the films I've mentioned there, the reason why they're in the book is, I mean, there are some really famous cult films in there, but the point is they combusted spectacularly and they often took down actors or directors with them. Wells is a very good case in point, but Friedkin would be another case in

point. In other words, you marked yourself out as not so much that you couldn't land a successful picture, but that you became synonymous with failure. And in Hollywood, nobody wants to back failure, proven failure, right? I will just read you Tim's comment here, which is really, really interesting. He's talking about why he decided to end with cats, Tom Hooper's film, Cats.

And the thing he says about Cats is A, if Tom Hooper is now ever asked about Cats, he refuses to talk about it. So if you interview for Tom Hooper for whatever project he's working on, you are advised strongly on no account mentioned Cats or he will get up and walk out. The second thing is Cats was well known in the industry

for everyone who took part in Cats. I don't know if either of you saw it, did you? Never. I rushed to the cinema to see it as soon as I knew how awful it was going to be and it didn't disappoint. Everyone who was in Cats thought it was going to be a smash hit. They did. They thought it was going to be like Mamma Mia, didn't they? They really, really did. So like you bump into actors who would say,

I'm in this thing, cats. Oh, it's going to be huge. It's going to be huge. So that thing we talked about in Adventures in the Screen Trade all those years back when we made an episode on that, John, the famous truism that nobody knows anything. Many of these films seem like really good ideas. It's not like they're all terrible ideas. They seem like really good ideas. But then as soon as they land badly,

you go, Oh my God, whoever. So and Katz writes, so Katz is anyway, this is what Tim says at the end of his introduction. The whole concept of the flop, as we used to know it, has been eroded by the box office impact of Covid-19, which for the best part of two years made everything into a flop, and pushed viewers in their droves towards the convenience of streaming and home cinema. This is why the final film to get a chapter here, Cats, could easily be the last banner fiasco of its kind, which merits Pride of Place as the grand finale to this survey of celluloid wreckage. How could it not?

If it exists to prove anything, it's that the medium would actually be the lesser without its failures. We crave them. We need to know all about them. And sometimes we can't help but treasure them even when we also can't believe what we're physically seeing.

And this is why I come, not to bury this ill-fated litter of miscellaneous catastrophes, but to dig them back up one by one." And basically, you know what this book is, the idea is so good all, quote-unquote, all Tim Robie had to do was deliver on it. Unfortunately, he absolutely does. It's really massively entertaining. That's out at the moment, box office poison, Hollywood story in a century of flops by Tim Robie. It's out in hard out at the moment, Box Office Poison, Hollywood Story in a Century of Flops by Tim

Rowe. It's out in hardcover at the moment. I imagine it will be out in paperback in summer 2025. Fantastic. Well, what a good selection. That's been great. What a selection. The details of all those will be up on our website and on our shop at bookshop.org forward

slash backlisted. Do you have any wishes for our listeners here? Well, I hope you have a happy new year. I mean that's the first one. Lots of good reading and I've got a New Year's resolution Andy. Go on. I have read just shy of 40 books last year and I want to read more this year. It's my New Year's resolution. I want to do better. Yeah okay. So I want to try and you know I won't say get to your high stakes you guys but I I want to try and... Looking out for that Nicky pile. Yeah yeah I'm looking out for the pile. Loving it basically.

Thanks for inspiring me guys. Oh shush and listen publishers if you've got books send them to Nicky Burch. She's gonna read them she's gonna read them. John what are your reading resolutions for this year? Have you got any? You know what? I haven't really got my head around it yet. So I've always got this plan to read the whole of Shakespeare again,

and I never get around to doing it. So the idea of doing a couple of plays a month, maybe I'll do that. Maybe I'll have time to do that, who knows? But I would, yeah, there's still quite, you know, my own personal shelf of betterment. There's still quite a few big things that I haven't read. There's still quite a few Russians that I haven't read. What about you? My New Year's resolution is to pick up where I left off in 2024, which is to

make more time for reading for pleasure. Because if I don't read for pleasure, I haven't got the energy to push through for all the other things I have to read for, including backlisted. Though backlisted is often a pleasure, some of the background reading is not so much of a pleasure. So to that end, I've come into 2025 reading an 800 page book about Paul McCartney's life and career and recording sessions. 800 pages and it merely covers 1974 to 1979 volume 3 on the way next year oh it's pure it is pure pleasure Nikki absolute bliss anyway don't you not know it all already Andy?

oh no mate there's always more to know. stay on the line we've got to go listeners but I'm gonna I'm gonna Andy splain this period of Paul McCartney's career to Nikki. Immediately we go off air. Yet do I know already? Well, here you go. I thought I did, but the level of detail here is insane. I'm afraid that's where we'll have to leave our snow drift of book recommendations.

If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the hundreds that we've already recorded, please our website backlisted.fm if you want to buy the books discussed visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop and we're still keen to hear from you on blue sky and postcards and Facebook and Instagram and however you can find us. If you want to hear backlisted ad free you can subscribe to our Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits.

If you subscribe at the lock listener level, you get two extra exclusive podcasts every month called Locklisted. And it features the three of us talking, recommending books, films, music that we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. Plus you get your name read out, company by lashings of praise like this. Ian Mason thank you, Andrew Paddock

thank you, Michelle Rashman thank you, Margaret Landis thank you, Dara Moskovitz- Grumdorff thank you Dara, Rebecca Burton thank you. Thank you so much for listening. Happy New Year, we'll be back in a fortnight. See you then guys, bye!