Joan's Picks: The House of Eve and When the Heavens Went on Sale - The Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin

The House of Eve by Sadeqa Johnson. Set in the 1950’s, it follows the lives of two young Black women - Ruby, in Philadelphia, hoping to get a scholarship to University (she’d be the first in her family ever to go to college) but meets a man (white, Jewish), falls in love and gets pregnant which shatters her dreams. His mother loathes her and is relentless in driving her out of his life - sending her off to a place which looks after fallen women. The other is at Uni in Washington and meets and falls in love with a Black man, so all good so far - except she came from a small town and had no idea there were degrees of Blackness and that his obscenely wealthy and almost white skinned family would look down on her so much. When things go wrong for them both they’re forced to make decisions that will shape their future and probably impede their dreams. And with that, their stories collide in the most unexpected of ways. 

When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance. He wrote a book on Elon Musk a few years ago. This one is about the race to outer space - something which used to be the preserve of governments but is now in the hands of private companies and venture capitalists. It follows four companies vying to get into space - one of them is Rocket Lab - and it really sounds like the wild west all over again. Oodles of money, weird, entrepreneurial, interesting people, a lot of it is spectacularly mad, but they’re all somehow becoming a part of history. 

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.