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, we're touring art galleries this week, from Boston to Paris and Madrid,

with writers who find them both inspiring and troubling.

We start with Teju Cole, novelist, essayist, photographer, an art historian,

whose latest work thrillingly combines all these interests into one. He was born in the United

States to Nigerian parents, raised in Lagos, and returned to America as a student. His

2011 novel Open City, which follows the meandering thoughts of the

Nigerian immigrant Julius as he wanders through New York City and Brussels, was widely acclaimed,

as were the novella, essay collections and photo books that followed. Cole has also built a huge

social media following through his inventive use of Twitter and Instagram.

But it's only now, 12 years on from Open City, that he's made a return to the novel with tremor.

The book drifts between modes moving hypnotically from essay-like investigations to lectures,

descriptions of disasters, and nights out dancing. At the centre of all this is

Tunday, a professor of photography at Harvard, the same university where Cole is a professor of

creative writing. Tunday is beset by social and political crises and closer to home, dying friends.

...