Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Carrie Plitt here as always with my co-host Octavia Bright.

Hi, Octavia. It is so exciting to be here with you today.

Hi, Carrie. I am delighted to be coming out of retirement with you.

Creaking, creaking a little bit, but I'm here.

The last time you heard us in your earbuds and on your airwaves, it was two years ago,

and we claimed to be recording our last ever episode of the show.

But we are a back baby for a one-off episode.

That's right. And we have both had some pretty big

changes in the last two years, baby being the operative word, actually. We have both had babies.

And Carrie, you've moved to New York, so we're recording this transatlantically. Praise being

for the power of the internet. But yeah, we keep talking about how much we miss discussing books regularly with each other.

And, you know, we've continued our long rambling WhatsApp conversations.

But we were really thinking we would love to have a more structured conversation about this insane experience of motherhood and how it relates to books.

And actually that it would be wonderful to make a

one-off version of our traditional year-in-review episode so we could come back at you with loads

of recommendations and we are so happy to say that this episode is being sponsored by the legendary

independent publisher faber and you're going to hear about some of their amazing sounding debuts

that they have coming out in 2026 throughout the show as well. As we've done in the past on our

year in review shows, we will look back over some of our favorite reads from 2025 and maybe even

some from 2024. And these were not exactly all books published in the last year, but I hope you'll forgive us. We will

revisit our 2023 reading resolutions that we confidently claimed we were never going to have to revisit,

so that will be fun. We will give some resolutions for the year ahead that we may never revisit again,

...