Paulette let me have a huge chunk of today’s Women’s Outlook show. Hopefully I did OK with it. I know I had some wonderful guests.

In the first half hour I talk to Emma Newman about her Split Worlds novels. Between Two Thorns is already in the shops, while By Any Other Name is available on NetGalley for those of us lucky enough to count Angry Robots as friends. If you are thinking of buying the books, please do take a listen. Emma does a fine job of introducing us to the complexities of the novels, and the only spoiler is something that happens in chapter 2. I’ll do a review of the books once I’ve finished the second one. I’m really impressed with the depth of thought that has gone into creating the Split Worlds universe.

Along the way we also get to talk more generally about fairies, and I name drop Neil Gaiman because he reminded me this week of one of my favorite pieces of art. Thanks to the BBC’s You Paintings site, I have appended a copy of Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke” at the bottom of this post.

After half an hour I swap guests and talk to Becca Lloyd and Roz Clarke about traveling to interesting countries. Becca was lucky enough to attend to Jaipur Literary Festival in India, while Roz is just back from a month’s writing retreat in Nigeria. Along the way we talk about how Western travelers tend to be shielded from the countries they are supposed to be visiting, about food and fashion, and a bit about the books that Becca and Roz are working on.

All of that can be found here on the listen again feature.

The second hour opens up with the feature we we still call “A lighter look at life”, despite the fact that it always turns political on us. This week Emma and I have a good rant about how we hate the British class system.

The I get to feature Emma as our “Woman of the Week”. We talk about her publishing career to date, and all of the interesting things that she did along the way. There are shout outs for Paul Cornell, Adam Christopher and Lee Harris.

Our studio guest for the last half hour couldn’t make it, so Paulette took charge and walked us through a discussion of various topical issues. I may have been less than enchanted with a certain recently deceased statesperson.

That lot is all available to listen to here.

All downloads and linkage is gratefully received. I still can’t quite believe that I get total to all these lovely writers on live radio, but we need need the listening figures to back it up or eventually they’ll stop asking me.