Welcome to The Best of Binge Reading 2023, Part Two, the second and final of our shows featuring the most listened to episodes on our popular fiction podcast, chosen solely on the basis of the number of times you, our audience, listened to them. It goes without saying they’re all best sellers, authors at the top of their game.

There’s something for everyone here, nerve wrenching contemporary thrillers from Ireland, to a French love story from a well loved TV actress; a World War II spy mystery by an Australian – set in the House of Dior in Paris, and a riveting journey into the world of the famous Mitford sisters, once acclaimed as London society beauties and then reviled as rotten traitors.

We present brief excerpts from each show, with links for where to find them if you’d like to hear more… As in previous years, we’ve selected shows that aired between Dec 1, 2022 and Dec 1, 2023.

So here they are – excerpts from the top six shows of 2023 on The Joys of Binge Reading.

Twisty Thrillers – Catherine Ryan Howard

Irish thriller author Catherine Ryan Howard with her latest nerve shredding suspense Runtime.

Catherine Ryan Howard – Thriller author

It’s a book that was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Crime Fiction Book Of The Year, and is a Top 10 Kindle Best Seller.

She been dubbed the Queen of High Concept thrillers for her intricate plotting which require a special excel spreadsheet…

First up I asked her about her revelation that Runtime was inspired by her actor brother, John Ryan Howard.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve said that the original idea was inspired by your brother. Can you tell us about that connection? 

Catherine Ryan Howard:  Yeah, he loves when I do interviews about this book because he gets a mention. So, he is an actor, and a few years ago he was in an independent Irish horror movie called Beyond the Woods. 

Of course, he was telling me all about the experience of being on set and one of the things he said, and in Beyond The Woods – if you read Runtime will sound very familiar because it was filmed in this house out in the middle of nowhere in the Cork countryside, in the dead of winter overnight.

They were shooting everything at night, and he said one of the first things they did is the director had to go to the local police station and say, look, if someone calls you at four in the morning to say, ‘I hear screens, I think someone’s getting murdered.’ They’re not.

It’s just us filming.

And of course, being a crime writer, I immediately thought, what if it’s someone getting murdered?

That’s a great cover story. You’re giving yourself a bit of a bit of time to get away a head start.

When I sat down to write the book, that idea went away and it turned into something else.

Movie making is murder

But that’s the initial seed, and I loved the idea of there being a script for horror movie that when the actors go to film it, the same things that are happening in the script start to happen on the set, because of course your first question I think would be, is this really happening or is my director secretly filming me or something?

It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not, and I think that’s at the core of the novel.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, exactly. You do open with a scene where the director and an assistant go and knock on someone’s door and say, ‘if you hear any screaming, don’t worry.’ And I immediately thought, oh, what a perfect cover for a crime.

Exactly that. The story does show a very close understanding of the filming process, what happens on set, and all the different roles that there are in the production side of things. I wondered if you’d had any personal experience of that yourself.

Catherine Ryan Howard: I really don’t like, first of all, my brother was a great resource, of course, and I have a couple of other friends who’d be involved in the industry.

So if there was something specific I wanted to know, I would go and ask them. And then I made sure after I had written it, that I had done it right. But I actually love movies about movies, so I love For Your Consideration and I love, there’s a great movie called The TV Set, which is about trying to get a comedy made and they’re both comedies themselves and I just love all that kind of ‘insider inside the industry.’

I wouldn’t have any deep knowledge of it, but I think there’s a lot of parallels. Between being an actress and being a writer in that you’re both in this entertainment industry, in a creative industry, and I just used every little thing I had heard about. There is some stuff that literally I got from people I know, especially there’s a scene towards the beginning.

Make it ‘confident but terrified’ Sure…

Where Adele, the main character, goes to audition for a commercial, and my brother has done lots of commercial auditions and I was asking him, what are they like?

And he said, the funniest thing is you’re often given completely contradictory instruction so that you go into audition and they say your character is confident but also terrified. Show us that.

What are you supposed to do now? I just love all that.

I think it’s hilarious and I used as much as I could in the book to make it seem like I had some in-depth knowledge. Yes.

Jenny Wheeler: So it switches between the book that the film is based on and the film set itself, and it’s quite hard sometimes to think about hang on a sec. Are we in the book or are we in the movie? It gets very intense.

WWII Heart-Turner – Carol Drinkwater

Carol Drinkwater is the beloved star of the English TV show or All Creatures Great and Small, and is best known for a series of best sellers about her life on an olive farm in Provence – made into a TV show called Carol Drinkwater’s Secret Provence.

Carol Drinkwater – from TV to popular fiction

But Carol also writes fiction, and her latest historical romance, Act Of Love, is a heart wrenching World War II story about a French village that opened its arms as the Nazis closed in, set in mountains not far from where she lives. 

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about the story and how you came across it. 

Carol Drinkwater: Well, though the story is entirely fiction, the incidents are not, and it’s part of the Alps where the book is set is in fact about an hour inland from Olive Farm, and i just happened to be there, reconnoitering around.

I came upon this village and there was the tiniest museum I’ve ever seen, which no longer exists, sadly. And in there, there were one or two… not exactly photographs, but there were just references to incidents that had happened in the Second World War.

And I dug a little deeper and found out that, in fact, this village, because this area was in the free zone of France — the Nazis came in and they took most of France, but they didn’t take this southern section down here.

And so Jews were down here, and those who thought that they would be in danger from the Nazis came to live in this corner.

And then as the Nazis started to move into the Free Zone, it became a dangerous area for anybody who was a target for them, particularly Jews. And this one small village inland of Nice, about an hour’s bus ride inland from Nice, voted a hundred percent to take in refugees.

Giving refuge to outcasts of war

It was a village of about 300 people, just farming people and mountain people.

And within, oh, six months there was almost a thousand people there.

And all the other people, of course, were foreigners. They were Lithuanian speaking, Polish speaking.

They were Jews from all over Europe who were fleeing the Nazis and they were safe for almost a year in this village. I don’t want to give the details away, because that’s what the story is inspired by.

It is the most remarkable story of how completely different peoples came together and created for a short while during a war, an area and an environment of peace and acceptance and diversity.

And it so inspired me that I thought I must write a story. My story is basically about a Polish Jewish family, but particularly the 17-year-old daughter who is on the cusp of her life, the verge of her life.

She’s about to step out, and wants to go dancing and do all the things that young girls want to do for. Fall in love, et cetera.

But there she is caught up in a war zone situation. However, within this village, she finds certain areas where she’s welcome and her life begins to open up.

So that’s the basis of the story.

Love in all its dimensions

Jenny Wheeler: And it is about love in all its dimensions, as you’ve outlined. Her most remarkable communal love, but she also does meet up and have an attraction to a young doctor in the village.

But the act of love that the book refers to is not just a simple romantic love. We’re not going to give it away, but she makes quite a self-sacrificing act for the benefit of others.

I wondered if you could talk about those terms of love at the heart of the book. As I say, it is a wonderful romance, but it’s much more than a romance, isn’t it?

Carol Drinkwater: Well, I think the point is that yes, it is much more than a romance and an act of love is actually, yes, it is the act of love.

What she sees is the risks the local people are taking to hide and look after 500 completely unknown foreigners whose lives are in danger.

If they are caught, they will be murdered. And if the villagers are caught, they too will be murdered.

She begins to see that actually, life is about giving. It is about opening yourself up to others and taking risks in order that we can all share the best of the world. And in the light of that, she makes a gesture, which I’m not going to say what it is. Obviously, she takes a step, which is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary.

And there were young women who made similar gestures, similar steps, not specifically Sarah’s story because I’ve made that one up, but that becomes one of the most important parts of her growing process, of her maturity into womanhood is to understand that actually opening your arms to embrace, no matter what the risks are, actually what really makes life worth living. 

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Dior Spy Thriller – Natasha Lester

Natasha Lester featured in Encore, a show for guests who have already been on Binge Reading before, talking about her latest World War II saga, The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre.

A story that the best-selling novelist Kate Quinn has called “a triple stranded delight.”

Former American spy Alix returns to Paris in 1947, determined to build a new life for herself with a fascinating job in the House Of Christian Dior.

But among the bolts of silk and cocktails at the Ritz, an old enemy lurks. Alix must reach back into her wartime past to trap her former adversary, hoping it is not too late to build a new future from under his shadow.

Jenny Wheeler: We know from our last talk that you have got a longstanding passion for Dior. So tell us about that.

Natasha Lester: I have. But this book was a bit of an accident in terms of how Dior was woven into the story, I have to say. I mean, I love his gowns.

I think he really revolutionized fashion. He is one of the few designers who can lay claim to having changed fashion so radically.

But for this one, I was really interested in what happened to women after the war.

World War II gave women freedom

They had amazing independence, they’d been able to earn their own money, work in any job anywhere during the wartime, because all the men were away.

And then suddenly the men came back from the war and women were actively dissuaded from working and told to return to the home and return to the kitchen. And I wanted to examine what that might’ve felt like for women.

And tied up in all of that is the New Look. And Dior is often scapegoated as being part of that re-domestication of women. But I think that’s oversimplifying it.

I think it’s much more complicated than that. And in fact, I think that actually, his aim was to celebrate women, at a time where women were told to return to the background and he was trying to bring them back to the foreground.

So in some ways, he was doing the opposite of what he’s often blamed for.

For this particular story, Dior worked well because he was such a marker for what was happening with women at the time, given the themes that I was trying to explore, and it didn’t hurt that I do love his designs and his gowns as well, I guess.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Yes. There is a very strong theme underlying it of how things changed for women after the war and just how utterly closeted they were in a sense. I don’t think I realized that in some places a woman had to get their husband’s permission before she could work.

No bank account, no trousers…

Natasha Lester: Yes. Oh, it was incredible to me when I was reading. I knew that there were things; like I knew women couldn’t have their own bank account, for example, at that time.

And women weren’t allowed to wear trousers into public places in Paris, and they weren’t allowed to wear trousers into restaurants in Manhattan.

So I knew there were some strange things like that going on. But I started reading Carmel Snow’s memoir, in fact, Carmel Snow being the famous editor of Harper’s Bazaar. And that was where I really began to see the way in which women almost had to be married in order to have some level of access to finances, because you couldn’t, as a single woman, own a credit card, get a loan, put it in a credit application to a bank.

You had to bring along a man to co-sign those kinds of applications for you. So this idea that a woman required a man in her life to be able to access those parts of society almost forced women into getting married, and it’s this very strange way of imagining society.

You know, particularly for me as a woman who’s always been able to have her own bank account and apply for a credit card and wear trousers wherever I please.

I wanted to unpick how that might have felt, once again, to have been able to wear trousers into factories during the war because that was what your work involved.

And then suddenly to have that totally taken away from you and the money that you earned to have no rights over that. That’s kind of a really tricky situation to be in and to not necessarily have the freedom to just choose to work, and to really be, I suppose, a possession in a way.

I mean, that’s really how women were, and that must have felt shocking.

Dark & Twisty – Liz Nugent

Strange Sally Diamond is the latest dark and twisted thriller from award-winning Irish novelist, Liz Nugent.

Liz Nugent – best-selling Irish thriller author

In this interview, Liz talks about why she loves writing gripping psychological bestsellers that are always laced with black humor, and explains how Sally is pretty close to herself; “Liz, without a filter.”

Jenny Wheeler: All of your books have intensely brilliant twists and your newest and the one we’re talking about today, Strange Sally Diamond, is no exception.

The opening is really mind boggling when you read that first paragraph. And because it is so striking, I wondered if you’d just mind reading that first paragraph to us.

Liz Nugent: I should have had this open before we started, but here we go.

“Put me out with the bins. He said regularly. When I die, put me out with the bins. I’ll be dead, so I won’t know any different. You’ll be crying your eyes out.” And he would laugh, and I’d laugh too, because we both knew that I wouldn’t be crying my eyes out.

“I never cry.”

Jenny Wheeler: In those few lines, you’ve already told us that Sally is different from other people,

Liz Nugent: Mm-hm…    It establishes the fact that there is something not typical about Sally’s behavior.

She’s somebody who doesn’t cry and is quite confident about the fact that she doesn’t cry. The question asked in that first paragraph is, is she not crying because she doesn’t love her father?

Or is she not crying? You know what, why?

It just sounds off because they’re laughing together, and yet she’s not going to cry when he dies. There’s something strange about Sally.

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