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Hello, today we have a rather chilly start to the new year with a return to the Cold War of the 1980s.

We learn about the pleasure of reading in installments with some wintry treats dropped straight into our inbox

and the enduring fascination with the uncanny nature of twins.

I think twinship exposes something about the tenuousness, the slipperiness of identity,

because if you can be replicated, you can also be replaced, you can also be undermined.

So twinship provides so many opportunities to interrogate what it means to be who you are.

And there'll be more on that unsettling topic later on.

But first, I'm joined by Francesca Kay, whose first novel,

An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers.

Her second, the translation of the bones, revolved around a miracle in South London.

In the longroom, she takes us deep into the world of espionage in the 1980s

with a sinister tale of surveillance and obsession.

Thank you very much for joining us, Francesca.

Thank you.

Your central character, Stephen, is a listener at a government institution.

Tell us a bit about who he is and what his duties are.

Stephen is a young man, aged 28, who had hoped for an exciting job in what he thought would be espionage of the more glamorous kind,

but who finds himself instead employed to listen through headphones

all day long to recorded telephone conversations, which even he knows mean very little to

anybody at all. And he just has to sort of plow through them day and then day out, doesn't he?

He listens to a variety of people whom he gets to know in various ways

...