You are about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about what goes into making one.

I'm Sadata Sese, an assistant commissioner of podcasts for BBC Sounds.

I pull a lot of levers to support a diverse range of podcasts on all sorts of subjects,

relationships, identity, comedy, even one that mixes poetry, music and inner city life.

So one day I'll be helping host develop their ideas, the next fact-checking, a feature,

and the next looking at how a podcast connects with its audience, and maybe that's you.

So if you like this podcast, check out some others on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Hello.

Today on Open Book, we're heading for the coast on literary pilgrimages and familial odysses.

Later, it's off to Latvia to hear from the founder of a new library dedicated entirely to books and relics that invoke, to paraphrase Melville, Forbidden Seas and Barbarous Coasts.

But first, a journey into a dark history on Croatian shores.

The Israeli novelist David Grossman won the International Booker Prize alongside his translator Jessica Cohen in 2017

for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar. It's about a stand-up comedian who recalls his life

during one long and memorable evening. Grossman's novels often cleverly encode the political

into the personal, from the book of intimate grammar, someone to run with,

and to the end of the land, which tells the story of aura, a mother who embarks on an epic hike

to avoid receiving bad news about her soldier's son. Grossman's own son was killed in the final days

of the Israeli Lebanon War in 2006, just as he was writing the novel.

And as he added in the notes, what changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which

the final draft was written. His latest novel, More Than I Love My Life, is the story of three

generations of women also shaped by the echoes of love and war. It explores themes of intergenerational

...