Books on Podcasts: Gareth Southgate shares his tricks of the trade
From lessons learnt leading high-profile sports teams, to inventive storytelling, dystopian technology and secret rebels in Nazi Germany, the conversations this week were illuminating and far-reaching.
Former England football manager Gareth Southgate was on the Waterstones podcast to discuss his book, Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Cornerstone). Reflecting on his career path, Southgate said: "When we’re talking about being ready to step up into leadership roles, you’ll never feel 100% ready and I think sometimes people can put barriers in the way… Very often we’re looking for one more course or one more year of learning and actually you’ve just got to get in there and not everything will go right. The facts [in] life are you’re going to fail at things, but being able to learn quickly and bounce back from those setbacks, I think that’s really important."
Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbo joined host James Crawford on the Take Four Books podcast to talk about his standalone thriller, Wolf Hour (Vintage), translated by Robert Ferguson, described by Crawford as "a story that takes in drug gangs, gun control and taxidermy as a dysfunctional detective Bob Oz hunts a lonely killer". When asked about his cantankerous protagonist who is not immediately likeable, Nesbo said: "In modern storytelling we are so used to how the story goes. I think that is the problem for storytellers, in order to be fresh, entertain and surprise you have to be ahead of them… I think nowadays you have to make it really hard. Stories like Breaking Bad did that, most of the modern TV shows – Sopranos, Mad Men, they did that. Even as a novelist I will praise the TV series for pushing storytelling in another direction."
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Grace Walker on her dystopian debut, set in a future society busy redefining the meaning of humanityHost Sara Cox interviewed novelist Grace Walker about her debut, The Merge (Magpie) – "a claustrophobic, dystopian, provocative novel… about preserving what matters most: love, identity and memory" – on the BBC Radio Two Book Club podcast. In the novel, a new technology offers Laurie the chance to save her mother from Alzheimer’s disease by merging their two consciousnesses. "It all started in a much more light-hearted way," explained Walker. "It was just a conversation with my partner about marriage and about how amazing it is that in today’s society lots of people still go ahead with that huge commitment to each other and I said: ‘Well, do you think if divorce wasn’t an option, people would still make this commitment?’ We decided probably, yes… And then I took it one step further. ‘What if when you got married, you literally had to [do] everything together and there was no escaping one another.’ I kept thinking about it and pushing it even further until it was literally you had to exist in one body." In her interview with Walker, The Bookseller’s Daisy Game described the novel as a "claustrophobic reading experience that prompts the reader to consider how they might feel if asked to share their body with an opinionated – and permanent – guest".
On the Simon Mayo’s Books of the Year podcast, hosts Matt Williams and Simon Mayo spoke to Jonathan Freedland about The Traitors Circle (John Murray Press), an account of a group of secret rebels in German high society that were arrayed against Hitler. Speaking on the book’s starting point, Freedland said: "On 10th September 1943 a group of nine or 10 top-drawer aristocratic, elite Germans, who had in common one thing – that they were defying or resisting Adolf Hitler, had gathered for a secret tea party. What they did not know was that sitting around the table with them was someone they thought was one of their own, a kindred spirit, but who was about to betray them all to the Gestapo."
