Julia Shaw and Hayaatun Sillem
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
FUNDAMENTALLY by Nussaibah Younis, chosen by Julia Shaw YOUR LIFE IS MANUFACTURED by Tim Minshall, chosen by Hayaatun Sillem ROSARITA by Anita Desai, chosen by Harriett Gilbert
Criminal psychologist Julia Shaw joins engineer Hayaatun Sillem to discuss favourite books with Harriett Gilbert. Julia's choice, Fundamentally, is a bold debut novel by Nussaibah Younis which sparks a bit of debate. Younis writes a comedy story about an academic who takes a UN job in Iraq to lead a deradicalisation program for ISIS women. Hayaatun puts forward a very different book, a non-fiction by Tim Minshall, Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge. His book Your Life is Manufactured reveals the seismic impact that manufacturing has both on our lives and on the natural world. Finally, Harriett's choice is a haunting novella called Rosarita by Anita Desai, an unsettling riddle that follows a young Indian woman's quest through Mexico to find out more about her mother.
Produced for BBC Audio Bristol by Becky Ripley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:07.2 | Things just swirling around my head. |
| 0:09.6 | Am I really the product of this? |
| 0:12.1 | Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests. |
| 0:17.0 | Little did I know what more was to come. |
| 0:19.5 | I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift, |
| 0:23.6 | we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database. They did know |
| 0:30.0 | that I was different. You had kids together. Yeah. Then you met. Then we met. The Gift. Listen on BBC |
| 0:37.1 | Sounds. |
| 0:39.9 | Hello. |
| 0:40.8 | If you're wondering what to read next, we've got three very different suggestions. |
| 0:45.2 | With me to recommend books they love are first, the criminal psychologist Julia Shaw, |
| 0:49.9 | Honorary Research Associate in Psychology at UCL. |
| 0:53.7 | Julia's TV and audio work includes co-presenting the BBC podcast, Bad People, |
| 0:59.6 | and her latest book, Green Crime Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them, |
| 1:05.5 | came out last month. |
| 1:07.4 | With her is Hyatt and Sillam, CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and co-founder of the Academy's Enterprise Hub. |
| 1:15.1 | With Matt Britton formerly of Google, Hyatton will shortly be launching the podcast, |
| 1:20.2 | What We Don't Know, How to Build a Career, Learn to Lead, and Make a Difference in a Chaotic World. |
| 1:26.8 | On which optimistic note, Julia, would you tell us what your choice of a good read is? |
| 1:32.5 | My choice is fundamentally by Naseba Yunus, and it is about this UN worker who is basically |
| 1:39.9 | suffering from what can only be described as a sort of bisexual juvenile heartbreak. |
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