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, mysterious things in today's open book, unrequited love, once-in-a-lifetime astronomical events,

and unexpected friendships forged in faith. We'll be talking with Sarah Perry

about her new novel Enlightenment. Plus, how do you write historically realistic imaginative fiction?

We'll be asking best-selling faders, Bridget Collins and Rosie Andrews. We're starting, though,

with the stars. Many of us have been scanning the skies recently in search of the Northern Lights,

but novelist Sarah Perry doesn't need a geomagnetic storm to be asking the big questions about life and the universe.

It's all there in her new novel Enlightenment, which, beginning with the transit of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997, examines ideas of faith and friendship across the decades.

It comes in the wake of the Essex Serpent, her much-admired Victorian-style novel,

and Melmouth, her modern retelling of Charles Maturin's Gothic tale.

Like those novels, Enlightenment is infused with a persistent otherworldliness.

This time, it's the world of a strict Baptist church in the fictional Essex town of Aldley,

where two wildly different congregants have forged an unexpectedly tender bond.

50-year-old Thomas Hart, the bookish-closited astronomy columnists for the local newspaper,

and 17-year-old Grace McCauley, a bright, scowling young scapegrace, torn between the demands of the church and the desires of adolescence.

...