You're about to listen to a BBC podcast, but this is about something else you might enjoy.

My name's Katie Lecky and I'm an assistant commissioner for on demand music on BBC Sounds.

The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that.

With music on sounds, we offer collections and mixes for everything, from workouts to

helping you nod off, boogie in your kitchen, or even just a moment of calm. And they're all put

together by people who know their stuff. So if you want some expertly curated music in your life,

check out BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Hello, on today's program, we grapple with changing realities and the very nature of existence.

We see a woman escaping the life laid out for her in Victorian England,

ask why depictions of life-watering illness are often absent from fiction, and descend into the baffling chaos of the quantum world.

We begin with Dame Rose Tremaine, author of 15 novels including the Booker shortlisted Restoration

and the Road Home, which won the 2008 Women's Prize for Fiction.

She's one of the Golden Generation named on Granta's 1983 list of best young British novelists,

alongside writers like Ian McEwan, Pat Barker and Casua Ishiguru.

An ever-curious author, her body of work covers a huge range of subject matter,

including Danish royalty, migrant workers,

Antipodean gold rushes, French property disputes, and in 1992's sacred country, gender transition.

Now she takes us to 19th century Borneo via the healing spars of Bath in her latest novel,

Islands of Mercy. Chief among the book's large cast of characters is Jane

A Dean, a doctor's daughter and nurse, the so-called Angel of the Baths, who faces a stark

choice between marriage and convention in the West Country and a much more bohemian way of life

...