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 we're exploring how personal narratives intersect with the vast arc of history,

but are still shaped by the whimsy and caprice of character and everyday life.

Linda Grant will be joining us to talk about her new novel, The Story of the Forest,

and the Journey from Latvia to Liverpool.

And I'll be talking to Zhao Lu Guo about an icon of modern Chinese literature.

But first, Linda Grant's novels are often studies in movement,

geographical, social, financial. They tell stories of displacement and dispossession,

fortunes won and lost, relationships made and sundered. She's a sharp observer of the British

Jewish diaspora and of the wildly different experiences of

successive generations. Her ninth novel, The Story of the Forest, begins in Latvia when a teenage

girl's mushroom-gathering walk turns into something far darker and prompts her family to leave

their home. Eyes set on America, they get no further than Liverpool,

and their sprouting families become rooted in the suburbs of Brownlow Hill and Allerton.

Suddenly a century has gone by, and the reader has lived through events both cataclysmic and prosaic.

...