Joan's picks: By Any Other Name and Safe Enough

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult. Told in two timelines, one in the 16th century and one in the present (well, almost present – the action takes place against Covid, just as there was a plague back in the earlier timeframe) – the premise being that women have been, and in the modern world are often, still unable to be credited for work which is presented as being done by men when in fact the women were the creators but have no voice. Jodi places much of the action around Shakespeare and posits that a woman named Emelia Bassano was actually the writer of his plays and sonnets but that the only way for them to be performed and published was to do so under his name. An enormous amount of research has clearly gone into this and it’s one of the most interesting and thought provoking books she’s done in a very long time. 

 Safe Enough by Lee Child. Twenty short stories by Lee Child, who proves that he’s not a one-series wonder with the Jack Reacher books – but in fact it’s clear reading these that they could also easily come from the same pen, and I think would be enjoyed by all Reacher fans. Easy to read as they’re bite sized stories and it’s a book you can pick up and put down without losing your place. The themes and characterisations are really clever. Quite macho as you’d expect from the Reacher creator, but a great addition to his oeuvre. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talk SEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Time to talk books, and Joan mackenzie joins me. Now,
good morning, good morning. We have got a couple of
brand new books from some very popular authors which will
make the fans happy. Each We'll start with Jody Pico.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Yeah, let's do that. It's that time of year when
the big brands are putting out their books and we're
seeing some really good stuff come through. This is Jody's
twenty ninth book, and she has a reputation for building
stories around moral dilemmas, and this one really is quite
a departure from that, and for me, it's the best
one that she's done in a very long time. She
writes about the premise of the book really is that

(00:48):
women very often struggle to have their voices heard, and
specifically in this book, which is written across two timelines,
there's the sixteenth century and there's modern day. She says
that Shakespeare did not write his plays, that there was
a woman called Emilia Bassano who wrote the plays and
sold him to shape because she was unable to get

(01:08):
her voice heard, and nobody would have believed that she
was capable of doing it, so she sold them to Shakespeare,
who made an awful lot of money out of it. Now,
the way that she puts her case is very interesting.
This book is very well researched, and she says that
Shakespeare's daughters, for instance, could never read or write. They
could only sign their names with a cross. But there

(01:28):
were women in his plays who was strong and powerful
and intelligent and very well informed. He set Hamlet in Denmark,
and part of that was a really good description of
the palace in Denmark. He never went to Denmark, but
she did. He set plays in Italy. He never went
to Italy, he didn't travel, but she did. And so
Jodie's built this case where she says that Amelia Bossano

(01:51):
wrote those plays and some of his poems and some
of his sonnets. Now, in the modern day, there's a
descendant of Amelia Bossano. Her name is Melina Green, and
she's written a play which she wants to get on
to the stage, and a theater festival plans to put
it on, but they're under the assumption that it was
written by her friend and roommate who's a black man.

(02:14):
So he gets all the credit for this play that
goes onto the stage in New York on the back
of the Shakespeare story about how again, as I said,
women struggle to get cut through. It's very well researched
and really well done, and to my great surprise, I
really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Twenty nine books and still coming up with novel subject matter. Yeah,
you know, yeah, incredible. And Lee Child is back, Yes
he is.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
Lee Child, of course, is best known for the Jack
Reacher's stories, and I will hasten to say immediately that
there is a new one coming later in the year. This, though,
is the first book he's written for three years entirely
under his own name, because the richer stories now are
co written with his brother. This is called safe Enough,
and it's twenty short stories. And I know a lot
of people kind of you know, they say they don't

(03:05):
like short stories. In fact, Lee himself says in the
introduction that his best short story has made significantly less
money than his worst ever Jack Reacher novel, that it's
very difficult to get people to read them, but he
really enjoys the process and reading these you can tell
that it's by someone who may well have also done
Reacher because most of the narrators in his stories are

(03:28):
unreconstructed men. A lot of these are written in the
first person. They're really easy to pick up and put
down because they range from somewhere between seven pages to
a story through to about twenty three, so it's an easy,
easy read. And I think the way that he's devised
his plots and these very few pages is really clever

(03:49):
and really well done. And if there's a Jack Reacher
fan listening to this, or someone whose dad is a
Jack Reacher fan, I think this would be perfect for
Father's Day. And I must just say, I don't think
we mentioned the name of the Jodie Pico novel.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Oh from the beginning by any other name? Correct, repeat
that Jody Pico by any other name was the name
of the book. And safe enough by Lee Child A
good option there for Father's Day.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Thanks John.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
See you next week.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.