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Welcome. It's our bonus Q&A episode of books of the year you get this one for free in the

studio with Andrew Hagen and if you probably heard our conversation about Caledonian Road, if not go back and listen to that first because it might make more sense that way.

Anyway, here we go then. Andrew Hagen, Q&A, what is the last book that you really, really enjoyed reading?

I've fallen love with the short stories of Alice Monroe.

Now the world lost Alice Monroe quite recently the Nobel Prize winning Canadian author of many many

dozens of brilliant short stories a famous writer for the New Yorker for the last several decades.

Alice Monroe does something that I don't think many writers can manage,

which is to take a small part of the world,

her native Ontario for the main.

I mean sometimes it's outside there, but mainly to take

that small world and to really animate its soul, to give you the people, their dilemmas, their troubles, their heartache, in such a gentle persuasive way

that you feel you're among them. You know, it's almost Jane Austenesque, that you're among them

in a particular way and I've always read her short stories but when she died the other week I went back to them and I've been reading them every day and there's one book in particular dear life just full of absolute beauty on every page sometimes sentence for sentence

...