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 on Open Book, we find beauty and banality, the extraordinary in the everyday,

in language that captures portraits of personal lives played out unseen.

Later we'll explore the prose of Annie Erno's observational journal of the

Cotidian in the Paris suburbs in a book Exteriors

with the author and curator of a new hybrid street photography book

an exhibition inspired by Erno's writing.

Can words create pictures every bit as powerful as a camera?

But first, an evocative portrait of a different kind of the landscape and forgotten language

of a remote Scottish island in 1843, as its lone inhabitant greets an unexpected visitor.

In Caris Davis's stirring new novel, Clear, a sense of places brought to life through

atmospheric descriptions of the landscape and labour and a remote and rugged island. There were days

when the sun was only visible as a luminous spot behind the clouds. There were days when the mist fell

like a cloak onto the island's shoulders. When rain fell in big, coarse drops, melting the soil into a soft brown soup, when a cold light wind blew low over the ground, making the bogs shiver.

There were days when the weather was so wild that dense seafone was driven over the land across Ivor's fields, damaging

...