Hello, this is Everything Else, the FT Culture Podcast.

I'm Grizz and I'm a commissioning editor on the arts desk here.

This week is our Books of the Year special.

Al can't be here today but I'll be joined by two brilliant guests, both of whom write about books for the FT,

Arifa Akbar and Alice Fishburn. And later, we'll hear my interview with Sally Rooney,

whose award-winning novel, Normal People, is one of our frontrunners for Book of the Year.

So we've been wanting to talk about our books of the year for a few months now. There have been

some really brilliant books out this year, both in fiction and nonfiction, and some very interesting

things happening in publishing, some interesting trends emerging that reflect things, of course,

going on in the wider world. So I'm going to talk to my guests, Arif and Alice,

about these things. And I'm also going to ask them, as well as new books, as well as books published

this year, which books they turn to in extraordinary times. So extraordinary political times,

which we're certainly living in now, but these could also be, you know, extraordinary,

wonderful, strange, painful, personal times. We also wanted to talk about a piece that Alice has

written, which is published in FD Weekend, in the Life and Arts section, this weekend. Alice has spent

this year only reading books by women. She decided to set herself this challenge

at the beginning of the year. And we're going to talk to her about why she did that,

what she learnt, whether women write differently from men, why that might be, and whether she's

going to continue this challenge into next year. This is our penultimate episode of the series. Next week we have a short

story or rather a personal essay by the amazing Korean-American author Alexander Chi. It's from his new

collection, which is called How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, which is definitely one of my

favourite books of the year. It's a very beautifully written

...