Welcome to literary fiction on NTS. I'm Carrie Plitt here with my co-host Octavia Bright. Hello, Octavia. Hi, Carrie.

September has just begun. Leaves are falling from London's trees and publishers are pushing out their heavyweight literary titles.

So what better time we thought than to do a back-to-school, the ultimate reading list?

Is there such thing as a summer read?

Do we turn to more serious books in the autumn?

What books are on this year's ultimate reading list?

Very big questions.

Yeah, we will be asking these very, very deep and important questions today.

So we've asked two excellent guests to help us answer them. Haven't

we?

We have. We have indeed. First we're going to talk to Dan Richards, whose latest book, Climbing

Days, is about his amazing mountaineer great-great-a-a-aunt Dorothy Pilly and his attempt

to follow in her footsteps, quite literally, from Wales to Spain to Switzerland, lots of icy

alpine experiences. And then we're

going to hear from our friend, dear friend of literary friction, Anna Jean Hughes, who is the founder

of the pioneering digital publisher, the pigeonhole. And she's joined us before in the show,

so we're really looking forward to having her back. And we're going to ask both of them about

the best books they read this summer and also anything they're looking forward to reading in the autumn.

Then for our third segment we'll be giving our own recommendations

discussing summer versus autumn reads compiling an ultimate reading list maybe

and then asking whether we even have the authority to do so.

So stay tuned to literary fiction. For our first segment,

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