James Rebanks and Kiri Pritchard-McLean at the Hay Festival
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
THE IRON AGE by Arja Kajermo A SHORT STAY IN HELL by Steven L Peck STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood
James Rebanks is a farmer from the Lake District as well as author of The Shepherd's Life. His new book The Place of Tides is about his time in Norway learning from an elderly woman who cared for eider ducks on a remote island. His book choice is The Iron Age by Arja Kajermo, a Finnish novel about rural life in the 1950s, told from the perspective of a young girl. James finds it speaks to his northern sensibility as it documents the hard life of an impoverished farming family in post war Finland.
Kiri Pritchard-McLean is a multi-award winning Welsh comedian, satirist and writer. Her choice is A Short Stay In Hell by Steven L Peck about a Mormon condemned to exist in Hell for millennia. Kiri says it's a book bursting with ideas about life and its meaning.
Harriett picks Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood set in a religious retreat outside of Sydney where a woman has come to reassess her life.
There's plenty of lively and good natured disagreement about the books. Listen here and add your thoughts to our Instagram Book Club @agoodreadbbc
Producer: Maggie Ayre
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Things just swirling around my head. |
| 0:03.6 | Am I really the product of this? |
| 0:06.1 | Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests. |
| 0:11.0 | Little did I know what more was to come. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Jenny Clemen and in the new series of The Gift, |
| 0:17.5 | we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database. |
| 0:22.8 | They didn't know that I was different. |
| 0:25.7 | You had kids together. |
| 0:27.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:27.4 | Then you met. |
| 0:28.3 | Then we met. |
| 0:29.2 | The Gift. |
| 0:30.1 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.1 | BBC Sounds, music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:42.3 | Hello, if you love a good read, we're here to recommend some of our favourites, and appropriately enough, we're doing this from a packed tent at the buzzing hay festival of literature and arts. |
| 0:57.0 | Busing, but as so often in hay, not entirely dry. So if you hear what sounds like a sort of storm |
| 1:04.7 | at sea distantly in the background, it's because the rain is falling on this tent like nobody's |
| 1:10.0 | business. |
| 1:16.7 | Anyway, we're not going to let this deter us. With me are first the multiple-award-winning comedian, |
| 1:23.0 | satirist and writer Kiri Pritchard McLean, host of the Radio 4 panel show Best Medicine. |
| 1:28.3 | Kiri is also guested on such TV programs as QI and have I got Newsview. |
| 1:39.0 | And with Kiri is James Rebanks, Farmer and best-selling author of The Shepherds Life, English Pastoral, and, just out in paperback, The Place of Tides. |
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