I am absolutely thrilled to kick off the new season with the brilliant Sunday Times bestselling author, Dr. Joanna Cannon, to talk all about her beautiful new novel, An Unlikely Visitor.

In this episode, Jo talks about her journey from becoming a doctor in her 40s to a bestselling author, how everything in life worth having starts with a pinch of anxiety and how meeting one reader in a signing line led to Jo dedicating this novel to her.

Of course, no episode of Best Book Forward is complete without lots of book chat and Jo’s love of books shines through this chat. We could have talked books all day long.

Joanna’s Book Choices:

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Talking Heads by Alan Bennett
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
• When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman

Books by Dr. Joanna Cannon:

• An Unlikely Visitor
• The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
• A Tidy Ending
• Three Things About Elsie

Other Books Mentioned:

• The Midnight Train by Matt Haig
• Roman Mornings by Matson Taylor
• Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves
• Tin Man by Sarah Winman
• My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier
• The Lido by Libby Page
• Still Life by Sarah Winman

If you loved listening to this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review Best Book Forward on your favourite podcast app, and don’t forget to tell your book-loving friends. It really helps new listeners discover our cozy reading community and helps us grow!

See you next Thursday for another wonderful guest, and happy listening!

🎧 Listen & Subscribe Now: : Best Book Forward Podcast

📲 Connect with Us:

• Follow Helen on Instagram: @bestbookforward
• Discover more book recommendations on our Website: https://bestbookforward.org/

Welcome back to Best Book Forward.

I'm your host, Helen, and this is the podcast where I talk to authors about the books that have shaped their lives.

You can think of it as a little like a bookish version of Desert Island Discs.

Today I'm delighted to be joined by best selling author Dr. Joanna Cannon.

Jo's incredible debut novel, the Trouble of Goats and Sheep was a Sunday Times bestseller and her books have sun sold almost a million copies worldwide.

Jo joins me today to talk about her beautiful new novel, An Unlikely Visitor.

If you love a story that wraps itself around you and lingers long after you finish, this is the book for you.

An Unlikely Visitor tells the story of Margaret, a recently widowed lady who feels like she has reached the end of the road.

But just when it feels like her story might be winding down, something unexpected expected happens when she comes home to find a very unlikely visitor.

An Unlikely Visitor is a story of loneliness, grief, hope, love, and the quiet ways that life can surprise us when we least expect.

Is a moving read, but it's one that will make you laugh and leave you feeling really comforted.

Today, Jo and I will chat about her inspirations and about how her work.

As a doctor helped to shape this story.

And of course, later in the show we'll also talk about the books that that have shaped her life.

Before we get started, I need to let you know that I made a little mistake with this recording.

I treated myself to some new headphones, not realizing that they had a little microphone in the cable, which means there are some clunks and clicks and a bit of echoing on my side.

I've cleaned it up as much as I can, but the good news is that Jo's recording is absolutely fine.

There's still a lot for me to learn about podcasting and I hope that it won't be too distracting.

And I have of course ordered myself a new pair of headphones.

So let's not waste any more time.

Let's welcome Jo to the show.

Jo, welcome and thank you so much for joining me today.

My pleasure.

It's lovely to be here.

I am so excited.

We've just been having a chat.

I have been looking forward to this day because I am so in love with your new book, An Unlikely Visitor.

So this is the proof, obviously.

I just, I just said to you this one I hugged when I finished.

I loved it.

Oh, that's so lovely to hear.

Thank you so much.

So do you want to start off then by giving everyone a little idea of what it's all about?

Oh, okay.

I will, I will try and summarise it without giving you any spoilers.

This is a story about loss, what it means to lose somebody in various different ways, and a story about grief, but it's an uplifting story.

It's a story about finding yourself in the midst of losing someone.

And it's about a woman called Margaret who's recently widowed and it's about three months since she lost her husband and the world is expecting her to kind of go back into her life and get on with things, but she can't because there's a derrick shaped hole in her life and she just doesn't know what to do with herself or who she even is anymore.

And it doesn't help that 40 years ago Margaret and Derek's daughter went missing on a paper round.

She disappeared young girl and was never seen again.

And no one knows what happened to her.

There was only really Derek that understood what they went through at that point.

So now Margaret seems to be completely on her own.

But one day she returns to her empty house to find an unexpected visitor waiting for somebody who might be able to help her solve the mystery of what happened to her daughter.

Do you know that made me really emotional then when you said the Derek shaped hole.

But it's an uplifting book.

You know when you read a book.

About grief, people go, oh, but it's, but it's uplifting and it's hopefully empowering.

It really is.

And it, yeah, it's so comforting and so warm and funny as well.

There's some really funny parts in it as well.

Thank you.

So I love finding out where these ideas come from.

So let's go back to the beginning and find out where the spark came from.

Was it Margaret and Derek or was it, was it character first or situation?

What was first?

If I knew where my stories came from, I would visit there more often.

But it always starts with a voice.

For me, goats and sheep, Elsie Tadi ending and this one all start with a voice.

And I think, what does that voice want to talk about?

What's that voice got to say?

And it's always a voice that you wouldn't necessarily hear a voice from the edges.

And very often it's something that I have come across during my life that's planted a little seed in my head.

And when I was a doctor, because before I started writing I worked as a doctor, I used to see a lot of people who had lost somebody, a lot of people who were grieving.

I saw a lot of death basically, which was very challenging.

But it made me think, as I was kind of walking the wards and going from department to department, how badly we all deal with death as a society.

We don't quite know how to deal with people who've lost somebody.

We don't know what to say to them.

Even doctors struggle with talking about death.

I can remember I'd been on the wards maybe a week, and I was on a night shift, and one of the nurses rang the porter's lodge and said, could we have a porter towards seven, please?

We've got a package for Rose Cottage.

And I thought, what's Rose Cottage?

Is it some kind of admin place on the estate somewhere?

Is it on the hospital grounds?

I've never heard of Rose Cottage, but it turned out that Rose Cottage and a package for Rose Cottage is in fact code between the nurses and the porters to say that one of the patients has died and can you come and remove the body?

But they say, a package for Rose Cottage.

And I thought, gosh, if nurses can't say it, and there'll be equivalent of this all over every hospital, if nurses can't say it, then how are we supposed to be able to say it?

How is society supposed to be able to deal with it when nurses who see it every day use these kind of code words?

And that thought stuck with me and I thought, at some point, I want to write about this.

I want to write about how we deal with death very badly.

And then the voice of Margaret came to me and I thought, aha, there's somebody who can talk to us about death and what it means to lose somebody, what it feels like to lose somebody, because no book is written by accident.

You know, every book, every author that writes is writing that book for a reason.

And very often you're answering a question in your own head in 90,000 words, something that's puzzling you.

And you see, the same authors will go back to similar topics.

They won't rewrite the same book, but they kind of revisit things.

And it's obviously something in their own mind that they want to kind of explain to themselves.

And I think that's what writing a book is.

In this book, writing these 90,000 words about Derek and Margaret, I explained to myself what it feels like to lose somebody.

Oh, my gosh, there's so much you just said there that I'm like a rabbit.

No, honestly, I rabbit.

No, I didn't mean like that.

You got me.

I know you didn't.

Oh, no.

But I rabbit on and on.

Honestly, when I Get on a topic.

I come off, it's like, press the switch and off I go.

I love that.

I think you're right.

And we had this conversation about how we deal with death in.

In a very awkward manner.

And we were talking about this at a family lunch a few weeks ago.

And I was saying, as a child, I was really fearful of death, like, because the way it was talked about around me, because people quite often say to me, you like it.

You like reading stories that sort of around death.

And I was like, but I think it's something that we need to sort of become comfortable with.

It's going to happen, right?

It's the one guarantee.

Okay, so let's talk then about Margaret.

Because I just adored her, Jo.

I absolutely loved her from the very early pages.

She.

She got in and I felt quite protective of her.

I really wanted her to be okay.

So I know you said this voice came to you, but was she based on anyone?

And how did she.

Once you sort of had decided, how does she come into you and onto the page?

I think I.

Based on my mum a little bit because my dad died 20 years ago, and I was amazed at how my mum managed to keep going without him.

It.

It stuns me how somebody who's been married 40, 50 years and then is suddenly on their own, how they managed to kind of push through and force themselves to go out and do things on their own.

So I'd watch my mum go through that with huge admiration.

So some of Margaret was based on my mum, but really it was all the.

The people, the women I'd seen who'd lost husbands and husbands who'd lost wives and these kind of lost souls wandering around trying to redefine themselves because they were part of a couple.

They were seen as a couple, especially an older generation, because a couple, they tended to do things together.

Now, I think marriages, there's a degree of independence that people do, you know, the woman or girlfriend do whatever she wants to do and her hobbies, and the.

The husband will go and do whatever he like and then they come back together.

But years ago, it was kind of a unit.

And very rarely, very rarely did my see my grandparents go and do something on their own.

And the same really with my mum and dad.

And I think, how do these people cope that they're suddenly having to redefine themselves and see a future, positive future for themselves at an older age.

And it was really a kind of a combination of all the people that I'd seen, the people, the patients on the wards Although I would never obviously write about them, literally write about them, because I think the GMC would have something to say about that.

But the kind of the influence of the people that I'd seen, because everybody has a story, we're all made of stories.

And as a doctor, I had the huge privilege of sitting down and listening to people's stories.

And when you go to medical school and the one question in your interview that you're bound to be asked is, why do you want to become a doctor?

And everybody says, I want to become a doctor because I like people.

What you're really saying is you like stories.

And there were all these stories.

You walk into A and e and there's 30 cubicles and in every cubicle there's an incredible story.

And it was the older people that I found the most fascinating and all the people that I saw who lost somebody and they came into my mind when I was writing Margaret.

Kind of a tribute to them and their courage, really.

So I find that equally quite moving, the stories in.

But hospitals as well, because actually, recently I was at a hospital appointment, I was looking around and I was thinking that the same, like, what's everyone here?

And all these stories.

And I was looking at particularly an elderly gentleman that was sitting there on his own.

I was like, oh, where's your support?

I hope it's there as well.

So the empty plastic chair at waiting, visiting times, there'll be beds with just an empty chair.

And I can remember in A, E once there was a horrible storm.

It was awful.

And in the middle of this really violent storm and all this rain, this.

This elderly woman was brought in in her 80s.

She'd been sitting with her husband watching television.

Decided to call it a night.

He went to make a drink.

When he came back in with a tea, he couldn't rouse her.

So the ambulance brought her in.

It was obvious that she.

She'd passed away in the time that it took him to make this drink, she passed away and she wasn't my patient.

She was taken into recess and they called time of death.

And I walked out into the corridor and her husband was standing there, you know, wet through from the rain, and over his arm was his wife's navy blue raincoat because he thought that she'd be going home with him and she would need her coat.

And it just broke me, Helen.

It absolutely broke me.

And it's things like that.

Because I think, how is that man going to cope now on his own without this woman that he's been married to for 60 years.

And it's things like that that stay in my head and it's things like that that I want to get on the page because they really affected me and made me think.

And, you know, as a writer, you want your reader to think so.

They are the things that I put in my books.

And it is.

I mean, just to sort of reiterate to anyone who's sitting there weeping into their tea at the moment, listening, we'll tell some jokes in a minute, but it's not.

It's not a story that's going to have you like, you know, bringing out your hanky all the way through.

It's beautiful, warm, funny.

But I do think that this is a topic that really does need to be talked about.

A lady I know just did a poll on social media, so her.

Her clients are all sort of younger, about my age, but she said she was absolutely shocked when the biggest result came back was how many people said that they were lonely.

Oh, yeah.

And she said it was women sort of in their 40s, 50s, 60s, who were lonely.

And it's not talked about.

So I think sort of sharing it on the page, people will sort of see maybe their neighbor or maybe their grandmother, maybe themselves in Margaret and Derek's story, and I think that's really important.

How was that for you to write, then?

Do you find it quite emotional to sort of dive into those?

I find it quite therapeutic because they're kind of ideas and thoughts in my head that I've put in a drawer and I pull the drawer out in my head and write about it.

And very often I'll go back when I've written a book and I think, oh, that's why I wrote that book, because that thing like the man with the navy blue raincoat over his arm, that bothered me, upset me, and somehow kind of purging and getting onto a page makes me feel better.

So it was therapeutic.

And I also laughed a lot because there's a lot of humor in there and I didn't know whether it was me laughing at my own sense of humor.

But you said you found it funny, so that's good.

Yeah, that's reassuring.

Yeah.

Because you've got to have light and shade in a story.

You can't just write about misery and loss and death and grief, and you've got to find some humor.

And I think there's a lot of humour in this book which will hopefully make people laugh.

Yeah, it does, but I think it's also.

It's just.

It's so full of Heart.

I mean, there was a couple of bits where I was sort of doing that sort of laugh and crying thing.

It was like, don't know what to laugh or cry.

Not that, but it was funny.

But it was also really moving.

And I've just thought, actually that raincoat from this man has.

It has come onto the page, hasn't it?

Because she can't move on from Derek's possessions like the dog lead us by the door and things as well, which I think probably happens more than.

Yeah, I'm sure, like, particularly for older people.

So Margaret has this unlikely visitor and I'm going to tread very carefully.

I found those scenes so touching because actually she has other visitors as well.

I think it was so beautifully done and as I said, it's funny moments, but it felt so natural to me.

It just felt like totally believable.

So I'd love to know where that sort of idea.

I know we're talking around a little bit where that idea came from and how you sort of brought it to life in such a believable way.

Well, it's very difficult to talk about it without giving spoilers away.

Um, but I like to push the boundaries with every book I write.

I could have written endless goats and sheep books, but I didn't want to do that.

I want to kind of move on a little bit and try something different.

And in this book I've tried something different.

I'm sure your listeners and viewers will probably work out for themselves who Margaret's unlikely visitor was.

But it was something that I wanted to experiment with and it wasn't easy because just logistically it's quite tricky to, to get the tone right because you don't want to be too far fetched, but you do want a little bit of magic in there.

And I think somebody who does that brilliantly is Matt Haig.

He always brings magic into his books and it feels the most natural thing in the world.

I believe everything that he says to me.

Me, no matter how removed from reality it is.

And I wanted to capture that type of realism, but with a little sprinkle of maybe this could happen, maybe it couldn't.

And my mum actually, she doesn't like reading books that can't happen.

She likes books that could happen.

My mum is 91.

Just to kind of give you some context.

And she obviously read my book when the Proof came through and she said, oh, I really love it.

I really Love it.

I said, yeah, but that couldn't happen.

She goes, oh, but it maybe could.

And I thought, yes, that's, that's what I want.

I want the kind of maybe could.

You just never know.

You just never know.

So it was tricky to write in places, but I think it came out really well and I was really pleased with it because there was humor and there was kind of poignancy and, you know, there's a bit of dose of reality in there as well.

So I think, I mean, it's so believable, so readable and it's.

I think when people read it together, it's going to spark sort of conversations again.

I had a dinner with a group of ladies and we were talking about, you know, things that we believe and sort of, you know, as you say, things could happen.

It's like, how arrogant are we to sort of think that we know all the answers?

And I love this sort of pushing of the boundaries just to.

Maybe it's because it's comforting, I don't know, but it's, it's a lovely idea.

I mean, if you'd said to me, if you'd said five years ago, there'll be a time when you can't sit on a park bench or hug your grandma, I would have said, that's ridiculous.

So you just never know in life what, you know what is going to happen.

Suddenly all these post apocalyptic books started to feel very real.

So you just never know in life what might, what might happen.

You never know.

Yeah.

And it's interesting you said about Matt Haig, because I've just read his new book, the Midnight Train.

Oh, I love that.

I think, isn't it great?

Oh, it's amazing.

It's incredible.

Yeah.

I hope Matt has got a hotline to the afterlife because if that's the afterlife, then I'm all for it.

It sounds amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, I just, I liked the Midnight Library, but this, the Midnight Train.

I just, I mean, I think when he sort of talks about it, you know, trains are sort of quite symbolic of like journeys that we go on.

Anyways, I thought it was lovely.

But I've also just read Roman Holiday.

Sorry, Roman Mornings by Matson Taylor, which also has this lovely sort of magical element.

And I was like thinking about the sort of three books and I was like, I wonder if that sort of significant to how we're feeling.

You know, it's strange, Helen, you should say that, because I've written a book that involves death and the afterlife and then I've.

I Read Matt's after I'd written mine, obviously, because he said he just sent the proofs out, so read the Midnight Train.

I thought, oh, there's another book that deals with kind of the afterlife.

And then recently I read one called Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves, which is a debut, and I think it's out in August maybe, or I might be making that up, but it's out kind of this summer, and that is about death, and it is utterly beautiful.

If your listeners or you or your viewers want a hot tip, that book is incredible.

It's out from Atlantic later this year, and that is about death and the afterlife.

And I thought we could start a little trend here, you know, never mind uplift, whatever they call goats and sheep.

That this is like death lit, so.

Or afterlife lift.

Afterlife.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it seems to be.

And you see this sometimes.

You see waves of a certain kind of book that seems to come forward.

And I think, were people writing these books post pandemic, which made us all think about mortality?

You know, is it that that's the kind of a hangover in our head from that?

Why are we all writing about death all of a sudden?

Not that I'm complaining, because I find it quite fascinating, but it is weird how these trends.

Isn't it?

Kind of.

I find it fast.

I find it fascinating.

And I wonder if it's like.

I mean, obviously authors are all probably not living the same lives, but you're looking, you know, you're living in the same world as us.

I wonder if it's like an energy thing, whether it could be, you know, that there's some sort of.

You're picking up on a. Cosmic.

Cosmic vibes.

Yeah.

We all need to read about dealing with death better.

Yes.

Yeah.

But also that sort of magical element.

I was like, particularly these three yours, Matt's and Matson's.

When I've read them, I've just been.

I was like, oh, just a real hug.

And I was like, oh, that's interesting that the hug in a book thing is obviously because we are living in a crazy world, aren't we?

We are.

And I. I also.

I also read that when there's any crisis, like world crisis, the sales of historical fiction go right up because people look to the past to try and understand how people got through things, through terrible things, to kind of give us courage and optimism that whatever it is the world is going through, we can go through it, too.

So people read a lot of historical fiction at times of crisis, which I thought was Quite interesting.

It isn't.

But I think also, like, I mean, you might sort of think, why aren't they reading, like, historical text?

But I think there's so much to learn in fiction.

I think because human stories like that, that's what we're sort of all trying to understand as, like, how we will.

We want something close, don't we?

We don't want clinical textbooks necessarily.

We want.

We want a real story.

It's the best way to learn.

It's.

It's the voice of experience.

Yeah, but it's like after.

I might get my sort of stats on this a little bit wrong, but after Covid, the sales of Regency romances were huge.

And it's like that sort of.

Which is where Bridgerton.

Sort of.

But I guess people like, you know, we weren't seeing our loved ones, so we were craving love.

Look back.

It's like.

It's so interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, it is interesting.

It is.

Yeah.

That's.

That's really fascinating, actually.

I can see.

I can see why.

Yeah, I didn't.

I didn't fall on that trend, actually.

No, me neither.

I don't see one genre that I don't normally read is romance.

You will never find people kissing in my book.

And if I'm watching a film, I will fast forward the kissing.

I think I want to get to the bit where she stabbed him with an ice pick, never mind kissing.

So I'm like, fast forward.

So I'm not the world's most romantic person, but.

Yeah, okay.

But not romantic.

But there's a lot of love in.

And unlike.

There is, isn't there?

Yeah, there is a lot of love.

Yeah.

You couldn't say it's a romantic book, but it is.

You know, it's a book with.

With love at its center.

Yes.

Yeah, that's true, actually.

And no ice picks.

No ice picks.

No.

I leave that to people who know what they're doing, like Lucy Foley and Lisa Jewell.

I will let them go on with that.

I just like reading them.

I do, too.

Okay, so I'd love to talk about the epigraph, then.

It's a quote from Rossiter Worthington Raymond that reads, life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon.

And.

And horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.

I just thought it was so beautiful, so comforting, but also one that I kept on going back to and reading it again because it was like, really sort of sparking my imagination and questioning my own thoughts.

So I'd love to know where did.

At what point did that quote come to you?

What drew you to it and the sort of significance the story?

Oh, okay.

Well, if you look at the.

The dedication of the book, it's to someone called Charlotte.

And Charlotte was one of my readers who I met for the first time with her wife Debs.

I met the two of them at Cheltenham Festival when goats and sheep very first came out.

And I became friends with them and they were so supportive.

Both of them are so lovely.

And I used to talk to Charlotte a lot on kind of Instagram messages and WhatsApp and.

And then she got cancer and she very sadly died.

And it upset me so much.

You know, you think authors, readers, relationship.

But I love getting to know the people who read my books.

If you come to me in a signing queue, I want to know all about you.

I'm interested.

And I love Charlotte and her funeral.

That quote was actually in the order of services, on the front of the order of service.

And I thought, what a perfect quote for this story, because it is to do with, you know, death is not necessarily the end.

There may be something after death.

You know, we think of death as being final and that's it, and we'll never see anybody again.

But really, we don't know that.

You know, we don't know.

And I think with my dad, for example, who'd been dead 20 years, he's everywhere in this house.

He built half of this house.

He built the room I'm sitting in now.

He planted the flowers that grow in the garden.

You know, he made a settle that we have in the kitchen that the dog likes to sit on.

He's everywhere.

And I think people who are gone.

I read recently that everyone has two deaths.

You have the death when you pass away, when you.

When your body kind of gives up and you pass away and then you have another death, when everyone who remembers you has gone and there's no one left who remembers you.

And as long as there's somebody who remembers you and smiles about you and dust your photograph, then I think you are still here.

So I think death isn't the end.

And I think if we look at life in slightly different way, we might realize that the people we think have gone are actually still here, little pockets of them, which is a huge comfort.

And it gave me comfort to think of Charlotte that way.

And that's why I wanted to dedicate the book to her.

Because although she's not here, her.

Her name and her spirit will kind of go all over the world with this book.

And that is something you can do as a.

As an author.

You can do that for people.

You can put these little Easter eggs in, you can name characters, you can put a memory in that someone has, and then that will travel everywhere in goats and sheep.

One of the characters who was the voice of reason was based on my dad.

And a lot of the things he said were things my dad used to say.

So now I know my dad's words.

Travel the world.

And now Charlotte would travel the world with this book.

And that.

That epigraph just seemed appropriate.

And because it was her funeral service, it just all slotted together beautifully, as though it was always meant to be.

So that's where that comes from.

I am sorry if that's upsetting.

No, I didn't think you could make this book any more special, but, yeah, I'm sorry that, you know, you've experienced that terrible loss, but what a beautiful thing to do for her and for her family as well.

I just think that is so special.

And when you talk about sort of, you know, reader, author relationship, I think that's something that, you know, social media has just.

It's just made possible because before I did this, I would never have reached out to an author.

And I love chatting to authors, online events.

I think it's so special that we have that because we were saying actually before we came on, like, some authors don't particularly like sort of coming out and chatting about this.

I know you love it and readers love it as well.

Yeah.

So.

And everybody.

You know, when somebody comes up to you and says, I bet you really fed up of hearing this, but I really love that book.

And I think I never get fed up of hearing this.

I. I never.

I was walking, actually, in the town where I live, we've had a new independent bookshop open.

Is amazing.

And I walked past and they got my book in the window, and I was like walking past my dog in the early hours of the morning, and I went, oh, I'm there.

And the thrill of that, you know, after all these books and all the windows I've seen, and you see yourself in a bookshop or a reader bothers to give up their Thursday evening to come and listen to you at a festival or in a book, that is so moving to me.

That's the connection.

And that's why we write.

We write to make these connections.

And you're absolutely right.

Social media and.

And things like this and podcasts, you know, and.

And Twitter or whatever the heck it's called now.

Those things are so Precious, because it.

It brings you together with people you would never have met otherwise.

And I would never have met Charlotte.

I'm sure she might have come to the signing queue, I might have signed a book, and off she goes.

But because we were all on Instagram, we were all on kind of Twitter, we managed to stay in touch.

And that, to me, is so valuable.

And everybody that follows me on social media and everybody that bothers to speak to me, I always try and acknowledge, because I think it's so rude if you don't acknowledge.

It's like ignoring someone in the street.

So I love to engage with people online, and doing things like this is so good, because it gives me an opportunity to talk to people I wouldn't normally talk to.

So I think it's so.

I mean, people will often message me on Instagram, like, oh, I read so and so's book, and I loved it.

And I was like, have you told them?

Like, oh, no.

I was like, oh, we love it.

They love it.

They're like, really?

If you didn't like it, maybe not.

I had one man say to me on Twitter, I've just read goats and sheep.

I said, okay, it goes, I've got a list of things I didn't like about it.

Would you like me to tell you what they are?

And I went, no, you're okay.

Thank you.

It's so weird, isn't it?

It is weird.

As you say, if you saw something on the street, you wouldn't be, I.

Don't like your earrings.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'd also love to talk.

So go back to the beginning of the book again.

And the prologue.

There's this beautiful prologue.

I've read it twice.

I.

Absolutely.

I think, because I'm really drawn to trees as well.

There's this prologue about this tree, which is so beautiful.

I just wonder if you could just talk to us a little bit about the tree and the significance of the tree, because it's so gorgeous.

Well, there's a tree in Margaret's garden.

We're going about 40 years now.

When she was first married and first had a daughter, there was a tree in the garden.

And they.

They had it from when it was a sapling, and they grew it, and it got bigger and bigger till it.

It kind of had independence and it could.

It could grow and provide shade and look beautiful.

And she would.

She would look out of the landing window every morning when she walked past and admire this beautiful tree.

And then one day there was a storm and lightning hit the tree.

And although they Got people in to see if they could rescue it.

It couldn't be rescued.

And so the tree had to be chopped down because it was dangerous, it was going to fall.

And it was the point in Margaret's life when she started to count her life more in the absence of things than the present.

So she would see that there was this huge absence in the garden of the tree and it was symbolic to her for the absence of her daughter who'd gone missing, that the horizon would never be the same again.

The look of her life would never be the same again.

And that is actually based on a tree that I used to see every morning when I walk my dog, not the dog I have now, a dog a couple of dogs ago called Clifford, who was a German shepherd.

And we always used to sit underneath this tree.

We do a five mile circular walk in the fields and we always used to sit underneath this tree and just have a minute.

And I called it Clifford Street Tree.

And then one day I was walking kind of through the fields, turned a corner into this field where the tree was, and I thought, there's something wrong.

What's wrong?

And I realized the tree had gone.

It had obviously been hit by light now you could tell by the ground, and the farmer had chopped it down.

And I was utterly devastated.

And I kept thinking, it's just a tree, like Joanna, get a grip.

It's just a tree.

But it just meant a lot to me because we always sat underneath a tree and kind of thought about life in general.

I went over our problem, on my problems.

My dog didn't have any problems, but it was symbolic to me.

And when I got to where they chopped it, there was kind of little slivers, cuttings of this tree.

So I took one from the.

From one of the big branches and I varnished it and I used it as a coaster.

So a little bit of that tree is still with me.

But, yeah, that was based on Clifford's tree because I can remember how devastated I was.

But, yeah, it's based on the truth.

Oh, it's a beautiful opening.

And I've just realised as you were talking about that we've been so busy nattering, I actually took.

I said to you, I have to keep notes because my menopausal grave.

I've skipped past something really important.

Oh, what's that?

I've skipped past the mystery that runs through this book, which is keeping.

And that is the mystery of Margaret and Derek's daughter, who, as you said, she went missing on her paper round.

It is a Brilliant mystery that sort of runs all the way through.

So when you look back to the sort of beginning, did you always know what was going to happen with Jeannie or did that sort of develop as you wrote?

I knew what wasn't going to happen.

I knew that I didn't want a classic culprit, shall we say, for this, this situation.

It was down south somewhere and she, she was on her paper and she'd met these two girls, cycled up to these two friends on a country lane, chatted to them, carried on cycling, went round the corner, these two friends who weren't on bikes, kind of got to the corner two minutes later and this little girl's bike was in the middle of the lane with the wheel spinning and no sign of her anywhere, and they never found her.

And I can remember hearing that story, thinking, dear Lord, how did her parents ever.

Because it's the hope, I should imagine, the hope that she might come back.

And when do you let go of that hope?

When do you stop having her bedroom the way she had it?

When do you stop leaving the porch light on?

When.

When does that.

And they must be very significant moments for parents as they're slowly letting go of the hope.

And that stayed with me and I wanted to include it in this book because it was a book all about loss and they'd lost their daughter in the most awful circumstances, so that's why I included that.

But I knew what wasn't going to happen.

And as I wrote the story, it became clear to me because I'm not one of these people that map everything out with post it notes on the wall.

I. I just have a vague idea.

I know where it starts and I know where it finishes.

I know the last line of every book I've ever written.

I've known the last line before I even began.

And I think, right, I've got to get to that point.

How am I going to get to that point?

And I don't plot anything out at all.

I think if you're writing police procedurals or thrillers, you have to, because you would write yourself into a corner.

But the kind of literary fiction you are, you have the luxury of allowing your mind to take you and whatever route it wants to get to, to get to the point that you know it's going to finish on.

And I remember listening to Sarah Perry one day and she said, whenever you write a Book, ask yourself, why am I writing this book?

What do I want to achieve?

What do I want a reader to leave with or think about?

Not in a preachy way, just when somebody kind of turns over the last page, what do you want them to have thought about?

So with every book, I've tried very hard to bear that in mind and to write towards that.

Not revelation, but you know, I think every, every book that's good, every book that you read changes you in some way.

It makes you think about things.

It might even change your mind about something.

If it's a particularly good book, it might give you the opportunity to, to hear a voice you wouldn't normally hear or a point of view you wouldn't normally hear.

And that's what I'm thinking about as I'm writing towards the end of the story.

But I, I don't have any post it notes, I don't have any plotting, which is quite scary sometimes.

And I do write myself into a corner, you know, but I write myself out of it, hopefully.

You know, I'm just loving this conversation because.

Oh, me too.

As you're talking, I'm thinking, I'm picturing your books.

I'm like the way that you're taking stories that matter to you, people that matter to you, and sort of your experience and putting them in with so much heart.

That's why as a reader, when I finished, I'm hugging the book because you've given me not only a great story, but you've given me some of your heart as well.

You do, you do, you put pieces of yourself onto the page.

Writing a book is like standing on a very, very big stage and saying, this is how I see the world.

Does anybody else feel the same way?

Which is very vulnerable and you know, you write.

I think every book should be under autobiography in a bookshop.

Because every novel there are pieces of us in there.

We hide behind other characters and situations that we've conjured up in our own minds, but really a lot of it is us.

And whenever you write, you have to make sure you write about something you feel so passionate about.

You have to really want to tell this story story and really have a good reason for telling it.

You know, you, you readable.

You think, oh, I think I'll have a go at that.

But it's like watching Andy Murray at Wimbledon.

You think, oh, I think I'll book a tennis court and have a go at that.

And you book a tennis court and you can't hit the ball.

And it's huge because people make things look easy.

But if you really feel passionately about what you're writing about and you really want to say something to the world, then you'll keep going.

And I think that shows in books when people are really, really driven by what they want to say in the story that they're telling you as a tool to say it,.

As you're saying that.

It's like yesterday it was.

That Sunday was the London Marathon.

And yesterday I was like, oh, no.

Oh, God, no.

I've never tempted to do that.

Never tempted.

Only year that I was like, oh, should I me?

You can barely manage 5K.

I'm like, no.

Oh, gosh, no.

I'll stick to walking my dog.

It's safer.

So you talked then about the reader experience.

And something I often ask authors is, you know, what you hope readers would take away from reading this.

So I'd love to know that.

But for this, I'd also love to know what you took away from writing an unlikely business.

What will stay with you from this?

I think it's the same answer for both questions.

What I thought, what I felt I took away, and what I hope other people take away is death isn't as scary as we think it is.

You know, death is frightening because it's the unknown.

And as human beings, we don't like the unknown.

We like to know exactly what's happening.

And I've seen patients who are frightened of dying, and they'll put on this huge act when the relatives are there, you know, oh, and more concerned with how their relatives are feeling than how they are.

And when the relatives have gone, I've had patients say to me, Dr. Jo, I'm scared of dying.

I'm scared of what's going to happen to me when I die.

They're not scared of pain or how they're going to feel in the dying process, because that's all taken care of, hopefully.

But they're frightened of what happens afterwards.

And I'd like people to take away from this book that we.

We can find humor in death.

We can find humor in tragic circumstances.

It's not all necessarily miserable and tears and grief and loss.

There's humor in there, too, because life is a mixture of light and shade, and even death has lightness in it, you know, if you look at it in a different way.

And I would like people to read this and not be so afraid of death, either dying themselves or dealing with people Who've experienced someone dying because we will cross the road rather than speak to somebody who's recently been widowed or bereaved.

Because we don't.

Not because we're cruel.

We just don't know what to say.

And, you know, saying, I'm really sorry for your loss.

I'm so sorry you're going through that.

That's enough.

It's not a situation that you can fix.

And human beings like to fix things.

Doctors like to fix things.

Some things cannot be fixed.

And sometimes all people need is to be acknowledged and to be heard.

And I think that is something that I would like people to take away from this.

You don't have to fix death.

You don't have to fix bereaved people.

You just have to acknowledge them and acknowledge their pain and try and hold a hand out and help them along.

I think for me, I mean, it's.

All of those things.

I found it very comforting.

I found it slightly healing as well.

But that sort of.

I think where you've used the humor throughout, you know, it just makes it sort of just easy to sort of start to think about.

And if anyone's sort of thinking, oh, it's a bit too deaf for me.

Trust me, it's a beautiful read.

It's not one that's gonna have you, like, sort of, you know, destroyed.

It's not one of those sort of like, it's so painful.

It is you know, just lovely.

Sort of little tears of love for it, I think.

Yeah.

I think if you're going to deliver a message or deliver something that you're hoping people will understand, then doing it with humor is the most effective way of doing it.

Yeah.

And I don't think a book that is purely about misery, people just wouldn't get through it.

You know, you would abandon it.

I would abandon it because too much, too intense.

So as well as grief, I've thrown a lot of humor and a lot of uplifting things and a lot of things that people will hopefully find comforting and useful and entertaining, as well as thinking about the message in the book.

Yeah, it is.

It's wonderful.

I mean, I loved it.

It's an unlikely visitor.

It's out on the 4th of June.

Highly recommend.

Yeah.

I didn't show you all my little tabs.

Oh, look at your little tab tapping away.

Okay, so we're going to move on now to talk about the books that you have picked.

You'll find books.

But just before we do, just let listeners know all the books we talk about and we've Mentioned a couple already.

I'll pop those in the show notes with links to 5 that'll be nice and easy for you to find.

So, Jo, how did you find picking your five?

Was it easy for you?

Oh, Lord, it was.

Well, like I said a few minutes ago, every book changes you, you know, so books that shape you.

I tried to pick books from certain points of my life, so that was like books that represented points of my life.

So that became easier when I thought of it like that because I could go through my bookshelves and say, well, all of them really have affected me in some way because that's the point of reading.

But the ones that I've chosen particularly represent a time of my life that was either challenging or rewarding.

Brilliant.

Okay, let's do it then.

Should we get started?

Okay.

Do you want to tell us about your first book choice then?

I don't know what order you want to do this, and do you want to do the chronological order?

Okay.

The first book that I chose was Little Women because it was a book that I used to take out of the library, my local library, as a child.

Every week I would renew this book because I hadn't grasped the fact that there was more than one copy of this book around.

And I couldn't bear the thought of the girls living in somebody else's house.

So I would go every week and get them to renew the book for me.

And my mum would leave me in the library while she went shopping to choose my books in the days when social services wouldn't have got involved with something like that, because that's what everyone did, and I would be left.

And if you've read Goats and Sheep, there's a scene in there in the local library, and that is definitely autobiographical, because my books were always late being returned.

I always got sharp looks from the librarians, and I always tried to take books out from the grown up section because I'd exhausted the children's section.

But Little Women was the one that I took out the most, I think, so that's why I chose that one.

Oh, I love.

I love that house.

It's ridiculous.

I just didn't.

I didn't grasp it.

Oh, I think it's lovely.

I think it's so like libraries when you were a child.

I mean, I was saying my mum used to take me on a Saturday morning, and it's just such a lovely experience.

My mum used to.

I never realized until sort of, I looked at it later, because my mum was a single mum, of how important it was for her.

She'd be chatting to the librarians and things.

So it's not just her about getting her books, but it was like a, you know, a point in her life where she was getting that sort of books bring people together.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I never would have started writing without a childhood spent in my local library.

It just wouldn't have occurred to me.

And my best friends lived in the pages of books.

I was.

I was only child of an only child.

I wasn't very good at mixing.

So all my friends lived within the pages of the books that I used to read.

Then I will move on to Alan Bennet, shall I?

I move on to Alan Bennett?

Yeah, sure, let's move on to Alan Bennett.

So I grew up on a diet of Talking Heads by Alan Bennett, and it was a BBC series as well as a kind of a written book.

And it was, if people aren't familiar, it's a series of monologues.

I'm sure everyone knows Talking Heads and I can remember sitting down and watching it before I read it, I watched it on the BBC and I knew within a few seconds who these people were.

And I thought, how does Alan Bennett do that?

How does Alan Bennett manage to show us who these people are in just a few words?

What kind of power has he got that he manages to do that?

And it absolutely fascinated me.

And that's where I got my love of an unreliable narrator from.

I adore unreliable narrators and I adore books and stories about ordinary people, because ordinary people have got the most extraordinary lives.

And I saw that as a doctor as well.

That was reflected in the patients that I saw.

But Alan Bennett was really the one who gave me a love of ordinary people and a voice.

His voices are incredible.

And I had this fantasy that one day I will meet Alan Bennett.

It's all I've ever wanted to do is meet Alan Bennett, because Alan Bennett, plus my local library was like, that was what made me want to write.

But I can never get to meet him.

And we've tried endless times to make it happen and it hasn't happened.

So in the Laws of Six Degrees of Separation, maybe somebody in your audience has a direct hotline to Alan Bennett, because I would.

I would love them forever if that happened, because he's my absolute writing hero.

I think he's incredible.

Oh, I think then you will, and it'll be at the right time for you.

I sort of feel like, you know, fate or whatever will intervene.

I hope so.

I hope so, because he really is incredible.

If By a chance, somebody hasn't read Talking Heads or hasn't watched it then, haven't you?

Oh, my Lord, no.

Okay, go onto YouTube and watch the original BBC series.

They're monologues and one is narrated by Thor, Patricia Routledge, Julie Walters, Maureen Lippman.

They're all really kind of big names.

And it's just a half an hour monologue of this person talking about a situation or talking about their life.

And they're all incredibly unreliable narrators.

And you all know within 30 seconds who that person is.

Exactly.

Because Alan Bennet is just, in my opinion, an absolute genius.

I love him.

Okay, I shall go and watch some of those.

You can also re read them.

The Talking Heads book.

Yeah.

Okay, perfect.

Okay, so let's look at book number three, then.

What was your first?

Okay.

Book number three, I think would possibly be Wuthering Heights.

I read.

I can remember when I was about 15, I was into reading thrillers and horror and death and dying and really dark things.

And for our English A level, we were instructed to read Wuthering Heights.

And I was in quite a struck about it.

I thought, I don't want to read some dusty old love story set in Yorkshire.

I want to read about people dying and ghosts.

And little did I know that this book was the ultimate book about ghosts and dark things and gothic stuff.

And of course, once I started reading it, I was hooked.

But it does show you that you should not stay in a corridor of what you think you like and what you don't like.

Obviously, at 15, that was.

That was quite a narrow corridor.

But I think even as you get older, you tend to.

To have these kind of limits about what you think you're going to be reading.

So.

And then also the reason I chose that is because when I read it later, kind of 10 years ago, five years ago, excuse me, I.

When I first read it, I thought Heathcliff was the ultimate romantic hero.

I thought she was amazing.

I wanted to grow up, find a Heathcliff of my own and get married.

And then when I read it five years ago, I was like, my God, this man is a beast.

He's awful.

This is toxic.

This is gaslighting.

This is domestic violence.

This man needs to report to the police.

You know, the difference in the way I viewed the book from when I was 15 to five years ago is quite incredible.

And I think books deliver what you need them to deliver at certain points in your life.

You see things in a story that you need to see at that point.

You know, as well as believing that I think the story finds you when you need to find it.

I think the right book finds you.

I also think that we see a great story like Wuthering Heights.

We see something different depending on when we read it and what we need to see at that point.

So that's why I included that one.

I'm like, nodding away like a loon over here, but I'm like, I totally think the same.

I think the right book will find you at the right time.

And how it's so interesting how your opinion of a character can change over time as well.

It's so interesting.

Like, when you look back at books you loved, it's like, oh, what did.

I see in that?

I know, I know.

Which I sometimes then think, like, when I'm recommending a book I read a long time ago someday, I'm like, oh, actually, maybe I shouldn't, because.

Was it as lovely as I thought?

I still haven't read Wuthering Heights.

It's like, have you not.

Oh, no, no.

I'm always intimidated by classics anyway, but this is like the one that I sort of really haven't got to.

No.

Well, I was the same with my next choice, which is Rebecca.

I had.

Yeah, I was, yeah.

And everybody kept nagging at me.

Not everybody, but a lot of people kept nagging at me to read Daphne d'.

Amelia.

And I was, oh, don't.

Same attitudes when I was 15.

I mean, it's ridiculous.

And I'm talking like, this is like seven years ago.

And Twitter gets in.

Oh, you need to read.

You need to read, Rebecca.

You need to.

Don't really fancy it.

Romance, isn't it?

And somewhere, downs like, cool.

No, no.

And in the end, I thought, right, you.

You win.

I will read it.

And I adored it.

And it is now my favorite book of all time.

It has everything that you could possibly want in a book.

It's got your big gothic mansion.

It's got your dead first wife.

It's got your sinister housekeeper.

It's.

It's just perfect.

She is the most incredible storyteller.

And now I've read so many of her books because I feel, you know, when you read an author that you love and you trust, it's the most wonderful feeling when you open a book and you start reading and you fall through this literally trapdoor, and you don't.

You just let them take you.

You don't question anything, you know, I don't know.

I might have to get into it.

You just fall through a trap door with your favorite authors and you Know that you're going to be safe and you know that you're going to be delivered an amazing story.

And that's how I feel about Daphne.

And Rebecca is just.

I love my cousin Rachel, but Rebecca is just incredible.

And I can remember when I finished reading it, I wrote on Twitter, oh, I've finished reading Rebecca.

It's amazing.

I love it.

And then I went to bed and then I got it to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

My phone was going mad.

It was jumping around and buzzing and I thought, oh.

So I had a look and all these people were saying, oh, congratulations.

That's amazing.

Congratulations.

And I thought, gosh, people are really pleased that I finished reading Rebecca carried on scrolling and it turned out I've been long listed for the women's prize for fiction, which been announced at midnight or whatever.

Crazy time they announced it.

And I thought they were congratulating me on finishing Rebecca.

I wasn't even on my radar, the women's prize.

And I thought, oh, okay.

I thought everybody was like congratulating me because I'd finished my first Daphne d' Amelio book.

So that was quite.

I mean, congratulations on both.

Well, yes, on both.

Yeah.

It was quite incredible because I just wasn't.

I don't.

I didn't even consider prize long lists.

It wasn't something on my radar.

So I think it's because I always imagined that authors would have an inkling that they were on a list and a possible.

So they'd be watching.

But so many people say to me, like, it's just out of the blue that they just.

It's incredible.

So as exciting for you as it's from us to watch.

Yes.

And I was aware of it because I really wanted Sarah Winman to be on the long list because I love Sarah Winman.

So I was aware that they were going to announce it, but I didn't stayed up to listen.

And then what?

Would that still live?

I think it was.

I can't remember.

I can't remember.

But I'm going to love haul her books.

Which takes us nicely onto the last choice.

Yeah.

Which is a Sarah Winman book.

And it is When God Was a Rabbit.

And that was the book that made me want to write.

I just adored that book.

I adored the Voice, I adored the story.

It was funny, it was moving.

And I can remember sitting reading it and thinking, oh, I wonder if I could write a book.

And at the point that point I was working as a junior doctor and I was incredibly stressed.

Not just with the kind of hours and the lack of resources and the lack of staff and the pressure everyone was under, but also the emotional burden of seeing all these awful things every day and not being able to let them go.

I couldn't let them go.

So I'd take everything home with me.

And I thought, I've got to have a coping strategy or else I'm going to burn out.

So that combined with Sarah's book, I thought, oh, I wonder if I could write a book.

So I started writing just as an escape, just as a coping strategy to get me through the wards.

So I got something else to think about when I got home and I didn't think it would ever be published.

I thought my mum might read it.

And that book became Goats and Sheep and it became a Sunday Times bestseller.

So a lot more people than my mum read it.

But it that.

That's why I started writing, because of Sarah's book.

And in a beautiful kind of circular way, I've now done events with Sarah.

I did an event at Chatsworth House for the Queen's Reading Room with Sarah.

And it was so special because she meant so much to me and she's played such a huge part in my journey.

Right from going to the library when I was little and taking out Little Women all the way through to Sarah Winman's book has been this.

This journey that's taken me somewhere I never expected to be.

I didn't think I'd ever become an author.

I think of myself as a reader, not a writer.

I still think of myself as a reader, not a writer.

So, yeah, I think of myself as somebody who loves books, who loves reading and I also write books.

It's just the way I think because I've always read, since I knew how to read, I've always read.

So that is my defining status.

But it's incredible that my book did as well as it did.

You know, the fact that it was published, the fact that so many people loved it.

And I can remember you do find out, you talking about prizes and whether you find out about prices, you do find out about the Sunday Times listing, kind of on the Tuesday, Wednesday of that week, my editor rang me and said, oh my goodness, you like on half a week sales, you're number seven in the Sunday Tries best.

And I thought, oh, my Lord, I did not see that coming.

So I didn't believe it until I saw the newspaper in print.

I kept thinking something was going to go wrong.

So on the Saturday night, I stayed up all night with my dog.

Eating crisp sandwiches.

And then as soon as the news agents opened at like 5 o' clock or whatever silly time news agents open, I walked down to the news agent to go and buy it.

And I sat there and looked at this and I thought, number seven.

And the next week I was number three.

And it was just so surreal, Helen.

It was like, this is a book I wrote in a car park just for fun, just to get rid of the stress of the job.

And all of a sudden all these people are reading it.

Isn't that incredible?

Isn't that unlikely that something like that should happen?

No, but there's so many brilliant writers out there.

I know, but it was a brilliant, brilliant book.

So it's not unlikely in that, you know, it's like, you know, it was very well deserved, so.

But it's an incredible story of how it came about.

But I don't think it's unlikely at all.

I think it was there.

Well, yeah, no, that's probably the wrong choice.

It was unlikely for me to end up, yeah.

Writing a book that then went on to become a bestseller.

It was something that I hadn't ever thought of doing.

I'd never considered it.

So many people writing books, I thought, yeah, you know, why would I?

What have I got to contribute?

But it just shows you that everything in life that's worth having always starts with a pinch of anxiety.

When I took that kind of goats and sheep that I was writing in my car, when I finally thought, oh, what if it's any good?

And I entered it into a competition at a writing fair festival, I was so scared, it was so scary, because you're so vulnerable as to how people are going to react to it.

But if I hadn't done that, if I hadn't found that courage, I'd still be sitting in a car park writing a book that no one would ever read.

And it's the same as when I applied to medical school in my 30s.

It was like, oh, should I be doing this?

Is this crazy?

So everything is with a pinch of anxiety.

But the rewards, if you can just get past that anxiety and get past the barriers in your head that say, I'm too old for this.

Things like this don't happen to me.

What's the point?

No one will like it.

People think I'm stupid.

Just get over that internal narrator that will nag at you and just think, you know what?

I've suffered a lot of deathbeds, Helen, in my life, and nobody has ever said to me, I regret trying.

I regret having A go.

So based on that, I thought, let's have a go.

So any budging writers out there who are thinking, oh, no, I dare show my work to anybody.

What if people don't like it?

What if they're laughing?

Just do it.

What is the worst thing that can happen?

Just do it.

Oh my.

I'm literally like, my cheeks are hurting from smiling away.

Because this is like, I'm just having this conversation with a group of women at the moment, like people who are sort of trying to start new ideas or, you know, new business.

And this lady who's sort of not mentoring us, but yeah, she kind of is.

She was like, when you get to the point of the anxiety, that's the point to go.

Because, you know, that is the start of something exciting.

Yes.

Anxiety and excitement feel the same.

Like in many ways.

Yeah,.

Especially women have to do that.

You know, we have to fight.

And one of the rules that I've made for myself is when people say, oh, you've done really well, you've had these bestsellers, you've done that, you've sold your book there.

And I turn around and my instincts say, yes, I've been very lucky.

And I think, no, I have not been lucky.

I mean, there may be luck involved in this life, but I've worked really hard.

So I'm going to stop saying I'm lucky.

I've just pulled this off my board.

What does that say?

I have like a little post it note board of things.

So when I'm having like, I'm doubting myself, which I do all the time, I have like little things that people have said to me that are nice.

But it is like, you're not lucky, you've worked hard.

Yes, it's true.

And we all, as women say, oh, yes, I've been really lucky.

No, you haven't.

You've worked bloody hard.

So stop saying you're lucky.

I know, exactly.

Trying to make yourself small and oh my gosh, I'm so excited.

And like, just to take it back to Sarah, because I said to you when it came through on your list, I was like, I'm so happy because I adore Sarah.

She's never been picked on this show and I think she has sparked a lot of people on their writing journey.

I'm pretty sure Libby Page wrote the Lido because of a conversation with Sarah.

Yeah, so.

And she's the most incredible person.

So she's so lovely, she's amazing.

And if anybody gets a chance to go and watch her at an event, do Go.

Because she's.

And on stage, because she's got a background in acting.

She's just incredible on stage.

And she's just the loveliest, kindest, sweetest person, which, you know, is nice.

It's an extra bonus.

And her books.

Tin man is one of my favorite books of all time.

I adore that book.

And when I read it, normally when I've read a book, I'll go and put it back on the bookshelf.

And I kept it by my bed for months because I didn't want to say goodbye to it because I loved it so much.

So it just sat there for months until I thought, I really need to move this.

Gonna get tea on it or something.

But I just love that book.

So there's another.

Another one for your list below, because.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah.

Tin man is amazing.

It's the most amazing.

I loved it.

And I love Still Life and the Audiobook of Still Life, because she reads it herself is amazing.

Yeah.

She did such a beautiful job of the audiobook.

It's an incredible book.

Yeah.

When we did Chatsworth, we were having a mic test, sound check, and Alan Titchmarsh walked in with his wife and went up to Sarah and he said, I'm really sorry to trouble you.

He said, but I read Still Life, and it's the most incredible book, and I just love it.

And he was really gushing about Still Alive, but I thought, oh, my God, that's Alan Titchmarsh.

And it's just like.

I think everybody that reads that book adores.

It's beautiful.

It's so beautiful.

But she's another one.

Like I was saying with you and your work, like, you put your heart in.

But I feel like with Sarah, when you've sort of met her a few times, you can see that she is putting as much of herself into her books, and that's what makes so special.

Like.

Yeah.

You know, and everyone saying that they can't wait for her next book, I was like, it'll be worth the wait, because whatever she's doing, it'll be incredible.

Yeah, she's really working on it.

So, yeah, it's the same.

I feel the same way about Rachel Joyce.

I feel the same way about Patrick Gale.

You know, all of their stories have got so much heart and passion and kind of enthusiasm in them.

Like, obviously, they're really feeling what they're writing about, and that comes across on the page.

So, yeah, all my favorite authors have that.

Have that feeling that they're giving me a piece of themselves.

When they write the book.

Yeah.

Amazing, right?

So then I'm going to just get you with that last question, Jo.

So if you could only read one of those books again, which one would it be?

It's mean, isn't it?

I think it would be Rebecca.

I dora Rebecca because it's my favorite book of all time.

If I could just have one book for the rest of my life, it would be that one, actually, Simon Savage.

It's his favorite book as well.

It's quite a few people's favorite book.

Yeah, it's just got everything and I just love it and I can get completely lost in it.

And, you know, we read books to escape, don't we?

At the end of the day, we read books to understand, to get different experiences, but also to escape.

And when the world is in the state that it's in at the moment, I think escape has become even more important to everyone.

And I treasure books because they give me that form of escape.

And I think Rebecca is the ultimate escape.

And if there's anybody out there who hasn't read it, then please do not do as I do.

And when.

Oh, no, I don't read that.

Give it a try because it's incredible.

Yeah.

Jo, I have absolutely loved this.

I could sit here and chat to you all day.

I know I could chat.

I don't know how long we've been.

Oh, my goodness.

And we're gonna have over an hour.

This will be a bumper edition.

No, it's been lovely talking to you.

And I think when you find.

This is what I love about book people, book people are genuinely lovely.

And genuinely, when I talk to people, whether it's you or something, assigning queue or Sarah Winman or editors, agents, whoever, we're all part of this incredible community of people who just love stories and we bond because we are all the same mindset that we love stories.

And this is why I love doing things, you know, we're talking about doing events.

This is why I love doing things like this, because I get to talk to people about my favourite subject, which is books.

Oh, it's wonderful.

I just loved it.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

I have been grinning and nodding along with Jo that entire conversation.

I absolutely loved it and I found it so interesting as well.

I really hope that you've enjoyed it too.

Jo's novel An Unlikely Visitor is out on the 4th of June.

It is a beautiful read.

So point poignant, yet funny.

And it's one that will just leave you feeling so comforted.

I highly recommend this book.

I think you're gonna love it.

All of the books that we've talked about today are linked in the show notes with links to buy.

So do go and check those out.

And if you're enjoying the show, I would be so grateful if you could take the time to rate, review, subscribe, and most importantly, tell your friends all about it.

I'll be back on Tuesday with our new teaser for our next author, and the full episode will follow on Thursday.

I hope you'll join me for those.

And in the meantime, thanks for listening.

See you soon.