In claimed she and her husband Dennis took a lethal cocktail of drugs after making a suicide pact at their home and stuff a chair but she survived Sara Hussein is the chief executive of the campaign group taking a say in dying this 80 year old woman has has been you know a teen mom and face the prospect of life imprisonment simply for acting out a fluff so I mean what didn't he dying to say is that compassion shouldn't be a crime but under our current law it is and that's got to change 3 teenagers are reading magistrates courts in the morning charged over the death of p.c. And she Harper the 28 year old died after being dragged under a van while in cheesey and Parcher last month the American secretary of state Mike Pompei who has described Saturday's missile and drone attack on site oil facilities as an act of war Mike Pompei was also blamed Iran although Taran is denying any involvement during a phone call Boris Johnson and President Trump agreed the need for a united response and the strain and hiker has been rescued from the bush near Brisbane after spending 2 days trying to crawl to safety with a broken Lake Neil Parker he's 54 fell 6 metres Dyna waterfall used his walking poles as splints and managed to drag himself 2 miles to clearing he was eventually spotted by a helicopter speaking from his hospital bed Mr Parker said he also broke his wrist in the fall but very hard to have. Because I had to carry my leg and try to pick it off and get over rocks. And just constantly struggling to get out. There and a half east of the stop. That's Neil Parker that shows you has the sports Tottenham manager you know admits his side needs to improve in defense after they blew a 2 goal lead at Olympiakos in the Champions League this about hurricane Lucas Mora putting them to game 2 to Manchester. He's passed a shocked I don't yes 3 nil in Ukraine and with the golds from Riyadh going to one and Gabrielle Jade Zeus. Meanwhile how many Real Madrid 3 male elsewhere to go Madrid and eventis true 2 to cricket and Essex have taken control of Division One of the County Championship after beating sorry by an innings and 40 runs it puts them 12 points above the 2nd place team Somerset they lost at Hampshire Essex play at Somerset at Taunton next week in what will be a title decider and Sweden's Robert Karlsson has been named as a vice captain for the European Ryder Cup team for their showdown against the euro us in Wisconsin next year Captain Parekh Harrington says Carlsen is very logical very straight he doesn't let the emotions get involved this is b.b.c. Radio 5 Live on digital b.b.c. Sounds small speaker some are taking a look at the weather forecast and it'll be a dry clear night ahead with the rain clearing in Scotland the day had should be sunny and dry for most of us after a fall the start the busy sounds music radio broadcast. From the from the World Cup. With my blood much coverage on b.b.c. Sounds. Good and what are your team wins or loses get the party going. To kill the queen of music mix as we play some of the books we love right now. Just listen to our. Story on the Sarah break Show on the 5 lives. Hope you're enjoying this program so far this is my favorite part the break must wait at we have an incredible interview with Carrie Hudson for you later in the program about her memoir lowborn growing up getting away and returning to Britain's poorest towns it is a really good rate absolutely fascinating chicken very day. Decision to basically go back to a life that she totally left behind had run away from and then realize that she needed to do it she needed to reconnect with it and it's done in the world of good joins me from astri tonight I'm delighted to say Katie guest is back good morning good to have you sooner rather than later formalised rid of the Independent on Sunday new projects editor at the publishers unbound and tonight has all this money should say her pick of the best books to explore the lives of ordinary people which is something we sort of specialize in a little bit on this show so this is perfect Who have you picked tonight. There are layers and layers and the interesting thing is last week I was here talking about books about friendship here I am back again talking about sort of working class memoirs a novel and it turns out they are all about family at least this current generation of the working class book are all about family and relationships with family particularly parents and particularly about as you say about Harry Hudson about. Really coming here. And getting away and escape and missing home and feeling connected or feeling disconnected from from your roots. Really fascinating books I want to start with one there which is number one book and it's one I particularly love because it's a whole anthology of working class voices called common people edited by Kate divel who is amazing. And it's many many different writers some of whom you will have heard of some are emerging writers who you might not have heard upper arm sure you're going to hear more about them in future there's a poem by the Manchester poet Turney Walsh who a lot of people remember. Exactly Longfellow who did that amazing poem recited his poem. In front of a huge crowd of people after the Manchester Arena bombings and really sort of brought a city together in recognizing where its strengths were and its Giants were in uniting. So he has a poem in common people listen McInerney He won the women's prize for fiction for the glorious heresies what 2 or 3 years ago. It's got me in bar the memory and journalist in London literary style or near it's got a poem by Mary Blackman the brilliant children's author called Snakes and Ladders which is all about which square you start on a knife and some people start in square one and some people star already it's quite 99 and it's kind of about you don't have to. Watch out for this thanks but you don't necessarily have to stay on the square at the start and then it's a really positive the whole anthology is really celebrate today and it's not about sort of victim status and saying you know we've had a really bad life there's a there's a story and I really love a short memoir by a writer called Katie Massey who grew up in basically a brothel run by a mother in Leeds Among was like the Cynthia Payne of Leeds and she as a child and as a young woman would sort of do our homework and sit chatting to all the women who worked there and they did they just teach her about the teacher to do so my can teach her about life and teach her about boyfriends and how to be how she ought to be treated by a man and. Is f.r.b. Lessons ology of such amazingly different people and stories and experiences and it's kind of all of the different intersections between class and race and juggle fee and being northern or being southern or feeling home somewhere or not feeling like you belong somewhere totally recommend I think as mazing Yeah I think Kerry Hudson's book is very much along those lines as well Katie in that it's not a good. I go from rough area down good it's very much go from rough area goes back to rough areas to try and establish you know a really connects with everybody and just have a bit of respect for the for the place that she came from and a bit of recognition for the voices that formed her Hearst I mean her granny was a fishwife and her mom went in to to pack fish then as well and she's got the really traumatic relationship with her mother you hear in the interview later on we kind of you know so much fits about another nun I start to get to about it all I'm sorry Sarah I don't really want to talk about it because I've 6 chose my words about as so carefully in the novel that speaking about her off the cuff I might feel like I might say the wrong thing but then her mother had an extraordinarily difficult relationship with Kerry granny who was a formidable character and I think quietly really there's there's a lot because I know one of your one of your books I'm going to pick on this one that is just grander is another one which reviewed this program salt water that's very much about relationships between women very much so and a lot of these are by no means all of them but a theme to a lot of them is sort of relatively absent fathers and very strong women and this is one which is it's a novel it is written in teeny weeny short chapters and it flicks Parkers and forwards between the neuritis present where she is living in her grandfather's old house on the Irish coast. In Donegal where she has been after our grandfathers died she's gone there with her mother basically burnt everything in the house because it's infested with mold and fleas and whatever. And she's staying there on our own after and she's sort of reflecting on her childhood and teens and university years and it's and it's almost a lot of the. Childhood sections are written in the 2nd person and addressed to her mother and it's very much about their their connection their physical bodily connection and the act of separation that happens when anybody grows up. And she she was born and grew up in the Northeast in Sunderland her grandmother worked in a fish market. There's a lovely story about an engagement ring and that I saw of the fair share. Their grandmother coming home and you know women putting on makeup on the smell of the helmet hairspray in the you know the smell of the the foundation and that they were put on to go out and dress up. And she sort of. She she longs to she she goes a bit wild as a lot of people do in their teens and she has these friends and she goes out partying and then she she moved to London to university and she's determined that this is going to be her big break she's going to be do this literature to Grange she's going to make it in London. And she is one of the very few people who has to go out and worked as a poor self through university and she's going to these parties in like Saudi princes mansions and then going straight to work in a dodgy berzerker the sticky carpet where she's sexually harassed by the manager and so sort of about coming to terms with being a woman and what that means and coming to terms with who she is when she's in the choir and she's separated us averages an island on our own and she's kind of figuring out who she is. Herself it removed from all of these relationships that have defined and I just say as well that it is absolutely beautifully written isn't it just yeah of course it's being compared by a lot of critics to Sally Rooney because it's a young woman who is. In Ireland. Obviously let's bring out Sally rainy but I wish she were you know it was nothing really silly really she's brilliant but it reminded me more of the terrible bios a daily would use became famous as it sounds like an insult to call someone an Instagram poet but she became famous by writing poetry on Instagram with with images and stuff like that but she wrote a memoir called The terrible. Which was about a young girl growing into a woman and coming to terms with her body in a sexuality in the effects that as. Has it's such implemented it's annoys me that you know because it's such a throwaway thing to say I mean it's literally the only thing that those 2 books have in common is that every woman when I think about exams read them both properly not just not just for work but for pure enjoyment and Jessica rounders writing is incredibly literary. Very highly descriptive and it's quite abstract where Sally Rooney stuff it is but there's a there's the minimal of description it's all dialogue you know I mean they're they are just they're not it's true it's just publishing they can I It is a sort of it's a way of placing something in a bookshelf and so as a sort of shorthand for if you know I say yes then you might like there you know if I see another this is the next. Anna Jones the writer the food writer at the new knowledge and I was like I don't know who's going to be more annoyed when jello. Like God leave them. Sorry I was run saying that salt water by Jessica Rogers which is well worth the rate Selina gulden her memoir Springfield wrote Selina go to she's focal. First of all can I just say if you have never seen her perform her poem read look up on You Tube or see as this segment is over scenario programs over look up Selina go to and read and just keep watching it gets better and better and better she says. Such a great performer and she's so her language in her all of her writing is so physical and visceral and womanly and human and animal and I just love it and this Springfield Road is a memoir and it's sort of loosely based on the terraces she's lived in and Springfield Road is actually a grandparent's house where she'd finds a place of safety and relative calm and it's this it this one is sort of addressed as a search for her father who is kind of disappeared out of her life when she was very very young too young to remember him. And it's also about her relationship with her mother and her younger brother. And she writes about not being able to write this memoir she sort of started it several times in bit because our father missing from my life she's kind of addressing it to him wanting him to want to be found and she also writes about the really physical recollection of a loss and an absence which is such a clever thing to do she writes about all the senses she wrote There's a passage that I've marked out she says I can still smell that day when I think of what I inhale some form of dust sticks in the back of my throat I can still summon the sensation of waiting for you dad of having you and losing you those few hours are an animal carcass I devoured all its tender flesh I boiled the bones to make a glue soup to keep us together and I slept in the height of the beast a dream of you I mean Isn't she amazing what amazing writer who else writes like that and this was initially sold to a major publishing house was in this book as a far as I know and then they went their separate ways. Because they kind of tried to chop up her story a little bit and try to make it fit into the misery memoir and she took a book back rewrote it and publish it with with you guys with and yeah it was before my time as I can't take any credit for it but yes it did it sort of starts almost as one book. Which she then goes back to run it and she's obviously put it away and come back to her a bit older and wiser. And more herself and more. Of a success as a as an adult. And perhaps with that bit of distance she was better able to write the book she really wanted to write rather than a book she was forced into writing because it's the new whatever it was the time here exactly a great quote from Selina God in our belief that if we do not start publishing more women we only pass on. Half of our inheritance half of our heritage half of the story let us have a little look at Joanna Cannon's memoir what's it called I love this book it's called Breaking amending and your account is not published for a week or so so I'll be really careful what I say but it's a medical memoir so it's the new Adam k. It's the new it's not at all but there have been quite a few really successful very moving medical memoirs by doctors and nurses medics recently which own came particular right about the desperate state of the n.h.s. And a lot of the people who are working in it who are just clinging on by their fingernails trying to keep it all together. And John McCann is better known as a novelist she wrote The trouble with goats and sheep and 3 things about Elsie which were really well reviewed. When surprises and she's a genius writer and it turns out it hadn't realized this until I read this book that she was she's a doctor she is medically trained she worked in psychiatry and this is a very short very moving memoir about her time as a junior doctor and she started her medical training quite relatively late in life she was an essay at ease and she'd left school with I think one hour level and she'd done a series of just repair for a regular job she'd worked in purpose and she'd worked as a secretary. And it was a it was a spy complete chance that she. Decided to try being a doctor and she always thought of herself as a bit of an outlier a medical school because everybody else had sort of planned out this great for their whole lives yes but she just writes what I love about it she says it's completely obvious to be a novelist and a doctor because what they have in common is stories. And writers are interested in hearing people stories and really reading between the lines and that's what a good doctor has to do as well. And she says in the in the book everything I done before all the points I'd pulled all the letters I typed had given me communication skills and an understanding of people you could never teach to someone in a lecture theatre and I think she comes across in it as a really excellent doctor the kind of talk to you really wish you could see if you were feeling frightened and ill and worried and desperate. And she sort of got told off listening to her patients too much you know caring about them too much and. It is she's a beautiful writer. And obviously nearly obviously nearly destroyed because junior doctors don't have an easy time of it at the best of times but children the position she was in it was it was a really difficult situation for it had been thank goodness she didn't give up on it. And she's written these books and she's now written a book about the whole whole situation of being a doctor funny etc Now that sounds really good I want to jump down a good through your list a little bit simply because I've read one second from the bottom. And I loved it. It's great a Damien ball's book Maggie and may here Sokol you know this was out a few years ago and he has since written a novel which is Pentasa tick but Maggie me was his kind of breakout book and it's a memoir of growing up gay in Scotland in the eighty's in such as Britain Anik it's. A unique story of living near the Ravenscraig steelworks where his dad worked in a Motherwell. And this is beautiful image of him as a little boy thinking they really specially my friends Craig because the sunset. Twice and his dad is responsible for the 2nd son so because it's where they. Wear them to the furnace every night so the sun sets once and then the steelworks kind of close for the night and there's a 2nd sunset on the horizon and he feels really special until that check comes along and puts the lights out and closes down the still works in his dad's out of work and. It is for his dad he's really beautifully drawn in this is yeah again a quiet difficult relationship the book opens with his parents having split up yeah him and this same NAEYC of Margaret Thatcher who will escape from the bombing of the Broads and I tell she. His mom goes off doesn't need that noise she she leaves the marital home and takes the kids were Yeah and they move into this new little house and they're watching on t.v. As a sort of wrapped up in their pajamas thinking what's happened to my life and there is these images of this woman coming out lightly dusty from a bombed. Out rises from rubble again and again like a cyber man or thought. And that just sort of shadows his whole life yes. And there's there's talk of the very a life effects of Section 28 schools when he tries to he thinks a teacher is going to finally talk to him and say So Ryan the teacher says I can't I can't talk to you about this yeah and it's just devastating. And as a bow it's kind of about poverty and but trust whine and male violence and a little boy who was saved by libraries and bar and teachers who care and a couple of really good friends and a quiz and again it's about escape and it's about those people who didn't manage to escape is about strong women in particular granny stands out to me as a character who. Wish I could me as amazing as Granny