Nazir Afzal & Maggie Gee
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 847 Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nazir Afzal prosecuted dozens of men responsible for grooming young girls during his time as head of the CPS in the North West of England. His role was dramatised in BBC1's harrowing Three Girls series which told the story of three teenage girls who were abused by a gang of Asian men. He is a strong advocate for women and his choice of book reflects this. It's the late journalist Sue Lloyd Roberts' The War on Women. Novelist Maggie Gee has written many books including My Driver, My Cleaner and The Flood. She has chosen The First Breath by Olivia Gordon which she describes as a rather neglected book on the lives of pre-term babies, their parents and the doctors and nurses in a premature babies unit. She calls it "riveting, touching and informative." Harriett's choice is Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee, the story of a magistrate in an unnamed colonial town on the edge of the British Empire where the indigenous people are referred to as 'barbarians'. These books provoke some very interesting discussion. Tell us what you think on @agoodreadbbc
THE WAR ON WOMEN By Sue Lloyd Roberts THE FIRST BREATH by Olivia Gordon WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by JM Coetzee
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 did know that I was different. |
| 0:25.7 | You had kids together. |
| 0:27.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:27.5 | 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. Hello, from the callous destruction of lives, especially the lives of women and girls, |
| 0:43.7 | to how the most fragile babies are being saved by modern medicine. |
| 0:47.6 | We're running the gamut with our books today. |
| 0:49.9 | And here to introduce them are first the author Maggie G, whose 14 novels include the White |
| 0:54.9 | Family, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, and most recently the dark comedy, Blood. Maggie's also |
| 1:00.8 | published a memoir, My Animal Life. With her, Nazir Afzal, erstwhile chief crown prosecutor for |
| 1:07.4 | North West England, perhaps most widely known for prosecuting the so-called |
| 1:11.3 | Rochdel Gruming Gang, more generally Nazia is a prominent force in the legal battles against |
| 1:16.2 | violence to women, and his memoir, The Prosecutor, comes out in a couple of weeks. |
... |
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