127: The Lads Return with a Mid-Year Roundup

Alice and Bethany catch up halfway through 2025 and chat about some new releases and backlist titles that have charmed them thus far.

Alice and Bethany make a cheeky little top 10 of their favourite books of the year! Head to our Instagram for the full list.

Doing a spot of Christmas book shopping and thirsty for recommendations? Alice and Bethany have you covered. They each choose a fiction, a non-fiction, a food and drink, a reissue and the book they'd most like someone to give them.

Alice and Bethany catch up on what they've been reading, but it turns out it's been a weird reading year for them both. Much yapping lies ahead.

Alice and Bethany chat through a few of the books they're excited about for the rest of the year, and ask their author and bookseller friends for more recommendations! Because of the way we have to record episodes in advance, at least one of the books is already out, so if any of them sound good to you, it may be possible to read them already rather than wait!

Following the escandalo that has dogged the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us, Alice and Bethany discuss a few forthcoming adaptations of books, plus one that's taking up a lot of Alice's brain space, released on the same day as this episode...

Alice and Bethany look inward and discuss the two books Bethany has released this year! First up, Big Date Energy, aka what happens when you try to write a romcom where the main character is more like 'The Friend', and then Slowcoach, where we talk about how weirdly horrible and borderline traumatic PE lessons were.

Alice and Bethany talk through what they've been reading so far in 2024, and how not recording the pod has affected their reading habits.

Inspired by the New York Times' list of the 100 greatest books of the 21st Century, Alice and Bethany each compile their own top 10s, and find they have only one book in common, but don't agree on what that book is about... Bethany's list:  The Fact of a Body - Alex Marzano-Lesnevich What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt Manhattan Beach - Jennifer Egan Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides Crimson Petal & The White - Michel Faber  Fingersmith - Sarah Waters Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro Life After Life - Kate Atkinson Alice's list: A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata (trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori) Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado Just Kids - Patti Smith Lanny - Max Porter My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl - Andrea Lawlor Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt

Alice and Bethany have the huge pleasure of talking to girlie of the moment, Eliza Clark, largely about her new novel Penance but also about true crime, Tumblr, the wild success of Boy Parts and its upcoming stage adaptation!