Books on Podcasts: Jojo Moyes on her latest novel, modern families and privacy
This week, established novelists took to the mics while debut writer Lucy Steeds spoke about her novel, The Artist (John Murray Press).
Jojo Moyes spoke on the Waterstones podcast about her latest novel We All Live Here (Penguin), which the author describes as a "comedic book about a very messy modern family and what happens when an extra elements drops into the family as a crisis point". She added that "part of the book is about the assumptions we make about other people’s behaviour and how we don’t actually have a clue what is going on". It "really is" a character study, stated Moyes.
Moyes also featured on the Simon Mayo’s Books of the Year podcast with hosts Matt and Simon. Speaking on the treatment of women in the public sphere, Moyes said: "You look on any writing platform, any women’s magazine, any newspaper column, and you will see women putting their lives out their, their travails, their disasters, their achievements. But far less achievements. There is something inherent in British society that doesn’t like women claiming too much success or too much pleasure, not without too much cost attached. I’m fascinated by that, it’s one of the reasons I don’t really write about my own life, I just have no desire to put myself out there." Moyes wrote on this issue in a Substack post published in September 2024: "Have you ever seen Lee Child or Ian McEwan write an essay about some highly personal emotional trauma?... No. They are asked about their craft, about the writing, their research, about professional developments in their lives."
Hannah MacDonald spoke to Steeds about her "debut of the moment", The Artist, which follows a painter, an aspiring journalist and the painter’s niece in Provence, 1920. "I was interested in the gap between what people see and how I could represent that in a novel," Steeds says of the "colliding" perspectives in the book. The Artist was selected as one of The Bookseller’s Debuts of 2025: Volume 1, described by fiction previewer Madeleine Feeny as a "tense psychodrama of female subversion and liberation exploring the legacy of war, the unreliability of perception and the hidden corners of art history".
Host James Crawford interviewed Emma Healey on the Take Four Books podcast about Sweat (Cornerstone), a novel which follows Cassie who, after escaping a relationship with her coercive partner Liam, makes a quick decision when he walks into the gym where she works. The novel partly examines with fitness addiction, inspired by Healey’s own experience. "I had a real bad birthing experience that made something click in my head," she tells Crawford. "I was desperate to reduce my body in some way and make it harder and less womanly and so I started exercising and fasting... I lost a lot of weight and got quite injured... I whittled myself down." This was channelled "hugely" into Sweat. "Almost everything Liam makes Cassie do, or his motivations behind the things he makes Cassie do, they are all versions of things in my head [at the time]".
