Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Souti and today I'm going to be

talking to Rob Rinder, a barrister turned writer and broadcaster who is known for being

television's Judge Rinder as well as for his sizzling salsa on Strictly Come Dancing. In 2020,

Rob was awarded an MBE for services to Holocaust education following his widely acclaimed BBC series

The Holocaust, My Family and Me, a documentary which helped Jewish families discover the full

truth about what happened to their relatives during the war. His first novel, The Trial,

has just been published and it's been described as a ridiculously immersive

who done it, and in the best tradition of John Mortimer's Rumpol series, and I'm so excited to

be speaking with him today. Rob Rinder, welcome to the Penguin podcast. Hello, love, what a delight

to be here. Rob's just found some debt on and sprayed it. It's my Chanel number five, as we're going to come to probably towards in the programme. We are. There is a waft of cleanliness in this tiny room which is probably asphyxating you but gifting me so much joy and memory and happiness. Listen, you're the guest so you get to spray as much as you like. I think we shouldn't go mad. I think I've got just the right amount. Little sense memory of my clean house, my childhood, and being present with you in a clean space, we're all happy. I absolutely loved the book. I gasped out loud. I laughed. I really, really like thrillers. I got into them during lockdown. And I thought it was I didn't, I couldn't work out who'd done it at all or what had happened until, you know, I didn't guess any of it. The characters were so three-dimensional. They were really vulnerable. They were really funny. So yeah, I absolutely going to recommend it to everyone. Is there a British thing? I'm not sure with British, or whoever it is,. As you're talking, I'm literally sort of trying to shrink in my chair. I'm lost protruding parts of my body to cringe with.

I think, no, stop saying kind things. I could much better cope with you sort of somehow getting out the red pen going you missed a bit.

I think I'm the same. It's very hard to receive a barrage of compliments, but, you know, I want to give them and you deserve them. That means a world to me. Good. Do you know what's really, one of the words you said in the introduction was the word immersive. I'm especially delighted by that word, as we'll hopefully come on to discuss in the book. I really wanted people to feel that they were invited into the world of chambers and to court one of the old Bailey through the lived experience or the

shoes of, you know, people who haven't been there and you can only go there if you're a barrister

and you can only be in chambers if you've had that chance and so few people do. So that really

mattered to me that you felt that you understood the bricks in the

building and the sense of the various emotional and political dynamics at play at Chambers,

like John Watermore in Rompel and, you know, this life, if you ever watched that in the 90s,

which was the programme, or the book, that inspired me to become embarrassed, pretty much.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, no, I did, I did absolutely feel

that. I think it's partly because Adam, so the book tells the story of Adam, who's a young

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