Welcome to our cheeky little Friday additional extra, a little bit of the Times radio show as an off-air bonus ball at the end of your week.

Now this is the Deputy Liter literary editor of the Times and Sunday

Times. She's a great young woman called Laura Hackett. There's not much about books she doesn't know.

And she's in a healthy amount of competition with the literary editor, who's another great

favourite of ours, a brilliant bloke called Robbie Millen. So every Monday

afternoon on our Times Radio show, get the Times Radio app, and then you'll be able to listen

for free Monday to Thursday between 2 o'clock and 4. We have a kind of literary salon and we talk

about some of the best new releases of the week. So here is Laura Hackett talking about some of the books that have

just popped and also discussing what the very successful author Bill Bryson had to say about the

huge number of self-published books. He thinks these days there are simply too many. So here is

Laura and she's got a lot on her mind, not least universality by Natasha

Brown, children of radium by Joe Dunthorne, and a documentary about the great Irish writer, Edna

O'Brien. Our guide this week is Laura Hackett, Deputy Literary Editor at the Times, but she's

very young, so she may well become literary editor might new in time laura

it must be on your mind well i guess we'll have to see how long robbie lives for really i don't

say that i think he's quite sprightly i think he's got a good few years he's probably 10 years younger

than me so don't describe him a sprightly please i hope he's not superstitious love we are that's Robbie Millen, by the way. I'm sure he's listening. Right. Now, what have you got for us this week? Actually, should we deal first of all with what Bill Bryson has said? Bill Bryson was, maybe still is, but he was mega successful, wasn't he, with his travel books? There was some about Britain, some about the US.

Have I missed anything?

Did he do want to buy Australia as well?

He may have done, he may have done, yeah, yeah.

I mean, he was incredibly, incredibly successful, great writer.

But what has he said?

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