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That's greenlight.com slash. BBC

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sounds music radio podcasts.

1:20

Hello on today's open book. We're fighting

1:22

for our lives Whether

1:24

in the ring for a bout of

1:26

boxing as US author Rita Bullwinkle takes

1:28

us into the world of girls competitive

1:30

fighting and a debut novel headshot or

1:33

Fighting through flight for a better life

1:35

and a new home as we discuss

1:37

how the novel can humanize the wide-ranging

1:40

experiences of displacement with award-winning

1:42

authors Mohsen Hamid and Taya

1:44

Obrigts First though we're

1:46

off to the middle of the US

1:48

and a faded gym called Bob's boxing

1:50

palace in dusty Reno, Nevada In

1:53

a battle for the daughters of America Cup their

1:56

eight young working-class women aged 18 and

1:58

under battle it out to be champ,

2:00

with each tough fight and the personal

2:02

realities that underpin them brought to life

2:05

in visceral prose. The

2:07

fact of the two girls' bodies was

2:09

not lost on Artemis Victor or Andy

2:11

Taylor or on any of the young

2:13

women in the Daughters of America tournament.

2:16

Their bodies were the only tools

2:18

they had at their disposal. This

2:21

wasn't lacrosse or tennis. There were

2:23

no rackets. They had their arms

2:25

and their legs and their headgear-clad

2:27

heads and their glove-covered hands, although

2:29

the gloves and the headgear were

2:31

just there as protective measures to

2:33

make sure they didn't kill each

2:35

other. The gloves and the

2:38

headgear were like clothing. One could

2:40

box with them or without them,

2:42

just as one could technically swim

2:44

naked or in a suit. Andy

2:47

Taylor and Artemis Victor looked at

2:49

each other's bodies under the roof

2:51

of Bob's boxing palace and tried to

2:53

figure out how they could make their

2:56

fists touch each other's faces. This

2:58

was the first match of the

3:00

tournament, the semi-finalist round. If you

3:02

lost, you were out. There was

3:04

no back door in the Daughters

3:06

of America. I

3:10

read in there from Headshot by Rita

3:12

Bullwinkle. I'm pleased to say that Rita

3:14

joins me now on the line from

3:16

Leipzig. I wanted to know what drew

3:19

you to the world of boxing and

3:21

specifically women's boxing. You know,

3:23

I think that so

3:25

much about boxing

3:28

is theatrical and lends itself

3:30

towards narrative. The boxing ring

3:32

itself looks like a

3:36

theater in many ways, both in terms of the lighting

3:38

and the way the ring can look like a stage.

3:42

I myself was a competitive youth athlete, although

3:44

I was never a boxer. I've never boxed.

3:47

But I found this

3:49

treasure trove of YouTube

3:52

videos of young women that would

3:54

take these long six, eight hour

3:56

videos of themselves documenting

3:59

the changing of their form over time.

4:01

And this was a technique that as

4:03

a youth athlete, I also used when

4:05

training. And when I found

4:07

these videos, I realised that I could

4:09

see myself in these young women. And

4:12

that it was through these

4:14

videos that I knew I had some access to

4:16

the sport and perhaps some access to the interiority

4:18

of what a young female

4:21

boxer might experience. And

4:23

you mentioned there that the boxing ring is sort

4:25

of theatre-like in many ways, but did

4:28

the notion of how boxing works,

4:30

these rounds, help you think about

4:32

how to structure a booking is

4:34

kind of quite small vignettes? Absolutely.

4:37

It was part of what drew me to the

4:39

sport, the kind of confines of

4:42

it, this idea of two

4:44

bodies, two psyches being in

4:47

opposition to one another. I mean, I

4:49

think so much about a boxing match

4:51

looks like dialogue, which is really exciting.

4:53

And I wanted with this

4:57

book, I really wanted to attempt

4:59

to have eight main characters, which a

5:02

tournament structure really lets you have. We

5:05

have these very different stories and very

5:07

different characters who are going up against

5:09

each other. But was there something

5:11

kind of specific you wanted to say about these girls'

5:13

lives when we meet them at this particular time,

5:16

which is about to turn 18, and

5:18

particularly working class girls' lives? I

5:23

think that something that the novel

5:25

was really interested in was

5:28

the feeling of money. And

5:31

it was something that felt true to the

5:33

world of youth sports and one that I

5:35

was interested in including. There

5:37

are a few passages in the book

5:40

that talk about how the coaches collect

5:42

the money and how the girls, what

5:44

various jobs they work in order to

5:46

pay for the entry fees. And that

5:48

really comes out of a lived experience

5:50

of having memories, of having to pay

5:53

those fees for various tournaments and trying

5:55

to figure out how to make it

5:57

work. specifically

6:00

interesting about well about lots of

6:02

the fights is I think the way that you

6:04

uh you play with time

6:06

did you have a lot of fun playing around

6:09

with time and and letting us know in

6:11

the midst of these bouts where these characters

6:13

would go? Absolutely

6:15

that was something I was really interested

6:18

in with the form of the book

6:20

and one of the reasons why I felt

6:23

like I could write it I

6:25

think of you know the way

6:27

Atalcalvino's stories can traverse

6:29

thousands of years in a paragraph and

6:31

so in the novel you learn how

6:34

many of the girls were born and

6:36

you do learn how all of them

6:38

die which was exciting to me

6:40

I mean I wanted to do that for a

6:42

few reasons one is because I wanted to gift

6:45

them all a long life this idea that

6:47

we're meeting them here just over the two

6:49

days of a championship tournament but they

6:52

have whole lives ahead of

6:54

them that this is something that makes them

6:56

who they are but it's not something you

6:58

know this two-day tournament that will

7:01

define them forever and ever and

7:04

that seemed true to my experience of

7:06

being a competitive youth athlete

7:08

but also true to my

7:11

experience of adolescence the way that during

7:13

that time period when you're 15, 16, 17

7:17

things can kind

7:19

of attract this like outsized importance

7:21

or outsized emotional

7:23

resonance that sticks with you but

7:25

that also thankfully

7:27

because life is long you can

7:30

kind of move beyond I think

7:32

that in sports narratives there can

7:34

be this sometimes suffocating and cliched

7:36

narrative arc of a certain

7:39

match being the most important thing that will ever

7:41

happen to a character and that seemed very shallow

7:43

to me and one that I wasn't interested

7:46

in replicating. Yeah well

7:48

that's interesting because like the fighters here

7:50

have like lots of very

7:52

different motivations for

7:54

taking part in something that doesn't really give them

7:57

much back you know that there aren't many people

7:59

who are going to watch them. I found that

8:01

really poignant but they're driven by

8:03

something whether it's taking part in this family

8:05

legacy or dealing with personal trauma. But is

8:07

this something else that you think they all

8:09

have in common that's driving them to this

8:11

sport that really isn't giving them much

8:14

back? I do feel

8:16

like one of the central questions of the book, why are they all

8:18

here to

8:22

compete in this tournament that has very

8:25

little if no societal reward

8:27

or even negative societal reward?

8:31

And I think what drives

8:34

them all is this

8:36

kind of radical notion of being witnessed by

8:38

one another, to witness

8:41

each other doing something that is very

8:43

very difficult and to have for a

8:45

moment a surety

8:47

that you have a shared reality with another

8:49

person which is in fact a

8:52

fairly rare thing to experience. Yeah

8:55

and the language that you use to sort of

8:57

share the experiences is so descriptive and I think

9:00

visceral. And you

9:02

mentioned before that you've never boxed but what

9:04

did the research of this book look like?

9:06

Because I was really surprised when you said

9:08

that because I was thinking you

9:10

must have known what it's like to

9:12

hit somebody and be hit. Yeah

9:15

I mean the sport that I played most successfully

9:17

is one

9:19

that is very popular in California,

9:23

water polo, not

9:25

well known, super well known in

9:27

the other parts of the US,

9:29

very popular in Eastern Europe. And

9:31

it actually is a sport in which you do

9:34

hit a lot of people. So

9:36

while I don't have experience hitting anyone

9:38

in the boxing ring, I've

9:41

wielded a punch or two in

9:43

other sporting contexts. And

9:46

is boxing specifically as a sport a kind of

9:48

metaphor for their lives in

9:50

terms of their past and their

9:52

future all kind of coalescing in this one

9:54

moment? I think so. Something

9:58

notable about the book is that... the

10:00

eight main characters in the book, while they

10:02

know each other intimately, and in some cases

10:05

have watched each other

10:08

play other matches for hours

10:10

at a time, they actually over the course

10:13

of the novel never speak with one another,

10:15

they're never in linguistic

10:17

dialogue with one another, which

10:20

is something I was interested in. And

10:22

I think that the sport of boxing

10:25

allows for this kind of psychic projection

10:27

and interiority in

10:29

a way that very, very other

10:31

few sports allow for narratively. Thank

10:34

you, Rita Bullwinkle, and Headshot is out now

10:37

from Daunt Books, along with a short story

10:39

collection, Belly Up. You're listening to

10:41

Open Book with me, Johnny Pitts on

10:43

BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. And

10:47

now from fight to flight, as

10:49

charged political debates rage on, how

10:51

can literature best highlight and humanize

10:53

that fraught, desperate, and far-reaching experience

10:56

of the refugee? Well,

10:58

to discuss writing such displacement, I'm joined

11:00

by Teah Obrecht and Mohsin Hamid. Mohsin

11:03

is the author of book of shortlisted

11:05

novel, Exit West, plus the international bestseller,

11:07

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and last year's The

11:10

Last White Man, and has spent his

11:12

life between Lahore, London, and New York.

11:15

Exit West is a genre bending novel,

11:18

beginning in a war-torn country where so-called

11:20

doors pop up to transplant refugees to

11:22

new places in an attempt to make

11:24

new lives. And so we

11:27

join Nadia and Saeed in their journey

11:29

from East to West and through a

11:31

dystopian London, where the city's pitched against

11:33

new migrants and refugees. Teah's

11:35

recent book, The Morning Side, takes us

11:37

to a metropolis of the future, flooded

11:39

and semi-derrally due to the effects of

11:41

climate change. There, a federal

11:44

repopulation program has taken in refugees from

11:46

abroad to keep numbers up, and we

11:48

meet a mother, daughter, and aunt rehoused

11:50

in a city tower with different means

11:52

to recall the life they left behind.

11:55

Teah herself grew up in the former

11:57

Yugoslavia, has lived in New York, and

11:59

currently resides- in Wyoming where she joins

12:01

us now down the line. Welcome both

12:03

to Open Book. I

12:05

guess I wanted to begin by asking you,

12:08

Teia, why you decided to use literature to

12:10

address the plight of refugees and look at

12:12

the sense of displacement. Migration

12:14

has always been the condition of the species.

12:17

You know, for the last century and

12:19

especially over the past two decades we've

12:21

seen migrations of people on an unprecedented

12:23

scale due to conflicts. You

12:25

know, climate change is a huge part of the

12:27

crisis in my book. And we

12:30

know that as it accelerates the causes

12:32

of conflict that lead to migration will

12:34

be more and more related to control

12:36

of resources, the availability of water, arable

12:38

land, livable land. It is already

12:40

the great crisis of our time and art

12:43

and literature in particular I think is

12:45

a unique and necessary way to investigate

12:47

that space and to

12:49

give us a chorus of voices that

12:51

put us in contact with every possible

12:54

experience of the reasons for movement, migration,

12:56

displacement. I mean we

12:58

have a sense of where you're writing about

13:00

but it's never really mentioned. And I wondered

13:02

if you could tell us about the story

13:04

you created in Morningside which began life I

13:07

believe is a short story that was written

13:09

in lockdown. It's set in

13:11

the not too distant future and it follows

13:13

an 11-year-old climate refugee, Sil, who leaves a

13:15

place called back home with her

13:17

mother and they end up in Island

13:19

City, a once great metropolis now mostly

13:21

submerged and they move into

13:23

a crumbling luxury tower called the Morningside

13:25

of which Sil's aunt Anna is the

13:28

superintendent and she's the

13:30

complete opposite of Sil's mother. She's really forthcoming

13:32

about the past and through

13:34

her folk tales Sil starts to learn about

13:36

her family and her heritage. Then it becomes

13:38

an exploration really of what it means to

13:41

exist in a culture you don't know and

13:43

to become part of a community and to

13:45

find out which of its stories can become

13:48

your own. There are certain

13:50

personal experiences that are fed in to

13:52

what you've just said in many ways.

13:55

For sure I was born in the former Yugoslavia

13:57

we left right at the start of the war

13:59

in 1992. My story is

14:01

not Sill's story. We were lucky

14:04

enough to be living in Belgrade, even

14:06

though most of our family lived in

14:08

Mostar and Sarajevo and saw a great

14:10

deal of siege, but we left

14:12

early and we left fast. And so I think

14:15

in many ways this book, though

14:18

it is not autobiographical, ended up

14:20

being quite close to the bone

14:22

on certain psychological and emotional truths.

14:25

In Sill's case, and then it turns out in

14:27

my case as well, the homeland no longer exists

14:30

because of course Yugoslavia did dissolve.

14:33

So what ended up happening in

14:35

this book was a great deal

14:37

of connection with the emotional condition

14:40

of being away from home, of

14:42

being in a kind of transitional

14:44

space, of not knowing the

14:46

culture that you're entering and trying very hard

14:48

to assimilate. Could we get a short

14:50

passage where we maybe get a sense of

14:52

this moving through this new place? This

14:55

describes Sill and her mother's

14:57

arrival in the building. By

15:00

the time we arrived, most people, especially

15:02

those for whom such towers were intended,

15:05

had fled the privation and the rot

15:07

and the rising tide and

15:09

gone upriver to scattered little freshwater

15:11

townships. Those holding fast in

15:13

the city belonged to one of two groups.

15:16

People like my aunt and my mother and

15:18

me, refuge seekers, recruiters from

15:20

abroad by the federal repopulation program

15:22

to move in and sway the

15:24

balance against total urban abandonment, or

15:27

the stalwart handful of locals hanging on

15:29

in their shrinking neighborhoods convinced that once

15:31

the right person was voted into the

15:33

mayor's office and the tide pumps got

15:36

working again, things would at least go

15:38

back to the way they'd always been.

15:41

Mason, could you tell us about the story you

15:43

created in Exit West and some of the themes

15:45

in that book? So Exit

15:47

West is the story of two

15:49

young people, a seidhan Nadia, who

15:51

begin in a city that is

15:54

descending into a terrible civil war.

15:57

The world is a lot like our

15:59

world, with one slight difference, which

16:01

is that these doors begin to open.

16:03

So one day, perhaps you go into

16:05

your bedroom and your closet

16:08

is an opaque black rectangle. And if

16:10

you were to push yourself through that

16:12

black rectangle, you would find yourself no

16:15

longer in London, but perhaps in Kinshasa

16:17

or Cairo or Sao Paulo. And

16:19

these doors begin to open up. We don't know

16:21

why, we don't know if they're going to stick

16:23

around, we don't know how they work. We just

16:26

know that they're there. And as

16:28

they begin to open up, the next

16:30

several centuries of human migration transpire

16:32

in the course of a year or two. When

16:35

Seidhanade arrived in London, they arrive in

16:39

a uninhabited W8 mansion,

16:42

clearly owned by some very wealthy

16:45

but not present people. Essentially,

16:47

what begins to be a sort of

16:49

squatter immigrant colony inside this home. And

16:52

London is divided between a sort of dark

16:54

London where the lights have been cut off

16:56

and services aren't being provided, just full of

16:59

migrants. And a light London

17:01

where people who are more

17:03

native reside and who have public

17:05

services. It's a

17:07

kind of migratory apartheid. London

17:09

in the novel is one that is hardened into

17:11

this division. But also it's a London

17:14

that realizes that if we're going to go all

17:16

the way down this path, the path

17:18

leads us to bloodshed. If we really have to

17:20

decide who can survive here. And

17:22

it's a London that recoils from that,

17:24

the final decision when it's a choice

17:27

between the violence required to purge the

17:29

city and somehow muddling through,

17:31

the city chooses to muddle through.

17:34

What does that slight distance

17:37

from what we might describe as reality do

17:39

for the kind of stories you're trying to

17:41

tell, Mohsen? Given that the

17:44

physical world that we inhabit isn't entirely the way

17:46

we imagine it to be. And given

17:48

that our own sense of self is a story

17:50

that we're constantly constructing, I

17:52

think we spend much of our lives aware

17:55

that reality isn't quite real. And

17:58

so what I like to do... I think similar to

18:00

what Pea also does, is to

18:02

put a slight fracture into reality, to

18:04

have something that looks recognizably like the

18:06

world that we inhabit, but with a

18:09

slight crack that reminds us that we're

18:11

not in the real. When

18:13

suddenly a loved one dies, it

18:15

feels like it's something impossible. How could this have

18:17

happened? But yet it does happen. And

18:20

so our life is full of these sorts of moments, like doors

18:22

that we step through. The idea for the

18:24

doors came when I was looking at people through screens on

18:26

my phone and my computer and thinking, what if I could

18:28

step through them? The technological reality

18:30

that we inhabit right now is one

18:32

in which our minds can move anywhere

18:34

instantaneously. We can be on the moon,

18:37

we can be in London. And

18:39

so I thought, what if our bodies could go too? I

18:42

think we have to have a reading from X-U West

18:44

after that, Mohsen. That's fascinating. Sey

18:47

the Nadia, meanwhile, had

18:50

dedicated themselves single-mindedly to

18:53

finding a way out of the city. And

18:55

as the overland routes were widely deemed

18:57

too perilous to attempt, this

19:00

meant investigating the possibility of securing

19:02

passage through the doors in

19:05

which most people seem now to believe. Especially

19:08

since any attempt to use one or

19:10

keep one secret had been proclaimed

19:12

by the militants to be punishable as

19:15

usual and somewhat unimaginatively by

19:18

death. And also because

19:20

those with shortwave radios claim

19:22

that even the most reputable international

19:24

broadcasters had acknowledged the doors existed

19:27

and indeed were being discussed by

19:30

world leaders as a major global

19:32

crisis. Following a

19:34

tip from a friend, Sey the Nadia headed

19:36

out on foot at dusk. They

19:39

were dressed in accordance with the rules on dress,

19:41

and he was bearded in accordance with the rules

19:43

on beards, and her hair was hidden

19:45

in accordance with the rules on hair. But

19:48

they stayed in the margins of the roads, in

19:51

the shadows as much as possible, trying

19:53

not to be seen while trying not

19:55

to look like they were trying not

19:57

to be seen. get

20:00

a sense of that kind of liminality and

20:02

anxiety in that passage. And I just

20:04

wondered how kind of your own life

20:06

has affected your writing. My own

20:08

life has been a life of migration

20:11

throughout. At the age of three, I

20:13

moved to California, didn't speak a word

20:15

of English, came back to

20:17

Pakistan when I was nine, no longer spoke

20:19

a word of Urdu. Then

20:21

back to America, 18, London at 30, Pakistan at

20:23

40. When I was younger, a big part of

20:28

movement for me was acquiring

20:30

this chameleon-like ability to sort of blend

20:32

in wherever I went. So

20:34

very quickly in America, I

20:36

spoke English with an American accent and very

20:38

quickly in Lahore, I became a Lahore kid

20:41

who spoke sort of Lahore slang. And

20:43

it wasn't until maybe my 20s,

20:45

maybe even later, that I began

20:48

to think, maybe I'm not

20:50

weird for being different

20:52

and thinking differently and thinking differently.

20:54

Maybe everybody feels like this. Maybe

20:57

everybody has this weird sense of

20:59

sort of being a kind of

21:02

misplaced and displaced

21:04

individual, the engineer and

21:07

the family of poets. And so in

21:09

a sense, I guess what I wanted to

21:11

do in this novel was to not

21:14

look at the migrant experience as something

21:16

that was peculiar or even particular, but

21:19

as something universal. And there, my,

21:21

I guess, central idea in

21:24

the book is that a

21:26

human life is in fact a migration.

21:28

We spend our lives migrating through time.

21:31

So without moving even five meters from the

21:33

place of your birth, you can experience a

21:35

profound migration. And what I wanted to do

21:37

in the novel was to get

21:39

beyond this us versus them mode of

21:41

thinking. And it begins by

21:44

lacking in compassion towards our own migration

21:46

experience, all the things that we have

21:48

all lost. And because we

21:51

cut ourselves off from a feeling of loss that

21:53

we have suffered, we then are unable

21:55

to grant that to other people who have come

21:57

to our country or to our city from somewhere

22:00

And so if we can begin in

22:02

a sense by acknowledging the sorrow of

22:04

each human's migration in life, we

22:07

can perhaps be more generous in affording

22:09

a sense of belonging to other people

22:11

who migrate physically as well as through

22:13

time. Is

22:15

that the kind of reason why you didn't

22:17

name the city? Did you want to try

22:19

to transcend a specific geography and look at

22:21

something more universal? I think I know where

22:23

this novel is set. I'm pretty sure, but

22:25

you don't name it. A lot

22:28

of people have come forward to speculate that

22:30

it is Manhattan, and there are certainly very

22:32

Manhattan-like qualities to the city. But

22:35

yes, it goes unnamed. It is a

22:38

composite of several different cities where I've

22:40

lived. I think that

22:42

anonymity affords a kind of universality and

22:44

a kind of haziness that I think

22:47

is compatible with Sill's particular

22:49

phase of childhood and with her own

22:51

sense of displacement. One of

22:53

the things I wanted to portray

22:56

in the book was the

22:58

sense of not

23:00

quite knowing where you are,

23:03

not quite recognizing cultural

23:06

markers, not being quite

23:08

culturally literate in

23:10

a new space, which I think

23:12

is a pretty universal experience for all migrants,

23:15

but then also all people entering a new

23:17

phase of life and a new environment. Not

23:21

naming the city removes the reader's

23:23

ability to recognize elements that Sill

23:25

herself can't recognize. It

23:27

throws them together in this sense of wandering.

23:30

You both seem to be updating our

23:33

understanding of a very wide-ranging experience

23:35

of displacement. I just wondered how

23:37

you were going about trying to

23:39

find new forms or new ways

23:41

of breaking stereotypes. For

23:43

me, I think it's just to echo what Maasim

23:46

said earlier, this notion of the

23:48

acceptability of grief and the necessity

23:51

of grief as a part of

23:53

moving through life and moving through

23:57

the world. I think it's a very

24:01

underrated literary mechanism and also

24:03

a very underrated cultural mechanism

24:05

because we're so fixated

24:08

on this

24:10

sort of perfect present and I

24:13

think hopefully my

24:15

work accesses that and tries

24:19

to use it as

24:22

a defining mechanism of character. I think

24:25

it's very important to imagine a

24:27

kind of critically optimistic position, not

24:29

a naive optimistic position, everything will

24:31

just be fine, but

24:33

a critically optimistic position which is we can

24:36

think of a place to go that

24:38

is better than this. It's achievable

24:40

and we can get there. I

24:43

think one of the tasks for fiction now, certainly

24:45

the task I set myself with exit west, was

24:47

to say let's enter into

24:50

this worst case scenario where

24:52

everybody moves. We

24:54

might find people adjust. They

24:57

wind up dating other people. They make

24:59

better music. They enjoy better food. Our

25:01

kids don't look like us but they're

25:04

better than us. I

25:06

wanted to take this notion that

25:08

migration leads to this mongrel

25:10

horror and suggest

25:12

that you know let's go there and does

25:15

it. Maybe it doesn't and if

25:17

it doesn't maybe we shouldn't be so terrified of it.

25:20

Thank you Mohsin Hamid and Thea Obrecht.

25:22

The Morning Side by Thea is published

25:24

by Weidenfeld and Nicholson and Mohsin's Exit

25:26

West is from Penguin Random House. Well

25:29

now from a dystopian New York to

25:31

a Manhattan with a Gatsby-esque flavor, it's

25:34

time for our monthly editor's pick with

25:36

Jocasta Hamilton from John Murray. My

25:39

editor's pick is a novel

25:41

called Ex Wife by Ursula

25:43

Parrott. It was originally published

25:46

in 1929 and

25:49

it was marketed as a scandalous

25:51

novel about husbands and sex and

25:53

this was a very effective piece

25:56

of marketing because it became a

25:58

huge hit. sold 100,000 copies

26:01

in the first year and it really

26:04

launched Ursula Parrott, that's not her

26:06

real name, it was published under a pseudonym. She

26:08

wrote 20 more novels, she

26:10

wrote a load of short stories,

26:12

film scripts, she sort of became

26:14

a millionaire but sort of rather

26:17

tragically she spent the money

26:19

even faster than she earned it and

26:22

she died in 1957, sort of in debt, hiding from a warrant

26:26

for her arrest and it was all

26:28

a rather tragic end. In

26:31

some ways it's a novel

26:33

about hookup culture and the

26:35

differences between expectations and desire,

26:37

what sexual freedom really is.

26:40

Ex-wife is narrated by

26:42

Patricia. Patricia is 24

26:45

and she finds herself after

26:47

just four years of marriage an

26:49

ex-wife and she and her

26:52

husband Peter, they had been a rather

26:54

gilded couple making their way in New

26:56

York and they have

26:58

agreed to be sort

27:00

of very modern in their outlook to

27:02

sex and marriage and that they would

27:04

have an open marriage but when

27:07

Patricia confesses to

27:10

Peter that she has been unfaithful,

27:12

she's had sex with someone else, he isn't

27:14

at all happy and this is really the

27:17

beginning of the end of the marriage. She

27:20

is sort of taken in by Lucia,

27:22

a slightly older woman who is also

27:24

an ex-wife and Lucia is showing her

27:26

the ropes, she's making sure that she's

27:29

going out to lots of parties, that

27:31

she's not just sitting around moping over

27:33

Peter. I'm going to read a

27:35

short extract, just imagine I've got a really

27:37

great sort of New York accent. You're

27:40

a success said Lucia one day, three

27:43

times out of five when the telephone

27:45

rings now it's for you. Ex-wife grade

27:47

A you turned out to be. Ex-wife

27:51

grade A I was. Sex

27:54

appeal dresses well looks young

27:56

dances lightly can make wise

27:58

cracks and is self-support. Let's

28:01

a man talk. Does not

28:03

gold-dick, except for another round of liqueurs

28:05

after dinner. Never passes

28:07

out, or gets raucous, or gets sick. Not

28:11

susceptible to the, I want you, I want

28:13

you, I want you attitude, but

28:15

likely to succumb to pity me,

28:17

my life is lonely. At

28:19

least once with any man. I

28:22

think it gives a sense of

28:25

the duality of Patricia's life, both

28:27

who she is pretending to be,

28:29

and what's sort of happening under

28:31

the surface. And the book is

28:33

very good on that. It has

28:35

got that kind of Gatsby-esque flavour,

28:38

particularly in the way it brings

28:40

New York alive. You

28:42

want to be out. You want to be at this

28:44

party. Thank you to Jocasta

28:47

Hamilton, executive editor at John Murray,

28:49

an ex-wife by Ursula Parrott, is

28:51

published by Faber. And

28:53

that's it from us. You can find details of

28:55

all the books mentioned today on our website. Next

28:58

week, join Book Club as Marlon

29:00

James discusses his Booker Prize-winning novel,

29:02

A Brief History of Seven Killings.

29:05

But from me for now, happy reading. Sooner

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29:41

to the Bright Side, a new kind

29:44

of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted

29:46

by me, Danielle Robé. And

29:48

me, Simone Boyce. Every

29:50

weekday, we're bringing you conversations

29:52

about culture, the latest trends,

29:54

inspiration, and so much more.

29:57

You'll hear from celebrities, authors, experts.

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