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...

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!

Alice and Bethany have the great pleasure of talking to Heather Parry about her short story collection This Is My Body Given For You, which is a gnarly little thing full of troubling images and ideas. She also talks about the great work she does at the Society of Authors, and lots more!

Alice and Bethany have the great pleasure of talking to the film journalist and programmer Anna Bogutskaya about her new non-fiction book Unlikeable Female Characters! They take a dive into the world of 'unlikeable' women through film and TV from erotic thrillers to Skyler White via the Hays Code and Amy Dunne from Gone Girl.

Bethany has the huge pleasure of chatting to Virginia Sole-Smith about her revolutionary new book Fat Talk: Coming of Age in Diet Culture, which investigates the radical possibility of abandoning our cultural fears around 'childhood obesity' to create bodily autonomy in children and beyond.

Alice's debut novel, Death of a Bookseller, is out NOW! So obviously Bethany had to ask her all the nosy questions about it!

Alice and Bethany have a whale of a time with the funny, smart Katherine Heiny, author of the new collection Games and Rituals, as well as the novels Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser. Games and Rituals is out now!

Alice and Bethany atone for not putting out an episode for the first three months of the year by telling you all about everything they've read in the first quarter of 2023.

Alice and Bethany are BACK from their unplanned hiatus! And they've got a long, juicy episode for you about their favourite books of 2022, which obviously they should have recorded weeks ago... but didn't. Enjoy!

If you've been listening to WPAYO for a little while you'll know that a true Book of the Pod is Come Closer by Sara Gran. We are so hyped that she has a NEW book out, called The Book of the Most Precious Substance, and that we got to talk to her about it for this episode! The Book of the Most Precious Substance is out NOW from Faber!

Alice and Bethany have the great pleasure of interviewing Chelsea G Summers, author of the bloody and brilliant A Certain Hunger!

Alice and Bethany have the extreme joy of interviewing friend of the pod, thee Erin Kelly, author of Alice's fave, The Poison Tree and Bethany's fave, The Burning Air, as well as huge bestseller He Said She Said! Her new novel, The Skeleton Key, is out on September 1.

Alice and Bethany discuss the dark and delicious novella We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets, translated by Emma Rault. We Had To Remove This Post deals with the corrosive nature of repeated exposure to violence on a content moderator for a tech giant, and we loved it.

It's no secret that WPAYO loved Detransition, Baby - we dedicated a whole episode to it! So we're beyond delighted to speak to Torrey Peters ahead of the British Book Awards, where she's nominated in the Discover category. Detransition, Baby is out now in paperback!

Alice and Bethany go deep on Red Dragon by Thomas Harris as part of their Blockbusters series, since they both love Silence of the Lambs.

This week we had the huge pleasure of talking to literary legend Joanne Harris about her latest book, A Narrow Door, which is absolutely brilliant, thrilling and haunting. We also chatted about the great work done by the Society of Authors, and Joanne's generosity with informal creative writing education via Twitter! A delight.

Alice and Bethany go through the five books they're each planning to read in the near future. If you want to see a list of the books, head to the podcast Instagram or Twitter!

Alice and Bethany take a look at a few categories from the British Book Awards and chat through their thoughts and feelings, as well as trying to predict what will win. Lots of chat, speculation and conjecture!

Alice and Bethany take messy gal fic into a darker direction with New Animal by Ella Baxter, which is out now from Picador.