Cassie McCullagh

new epic.

But I think it's quite clever.

Well, because the Oxyrhynchus papyrus will give you all of those things that drive you a bit nuts, which is it will give you shopping lists and it will give you very fragmented details of everyday life.

Whereas what he's doing here is giving you another grand narrative.

And if you like a grand narrative, you're getting one that will sit beside the Iliad and the Odyssey rather than sitting...

...beside something else.

So, I mean, it gives you a story.

But if you're a classicist, don't think, or if you want to be a classicist, don't think you're going to get your work done as quickly or as neatly as this because you won't.

Well, that's terrifying.

And that's possibly another book that's with as a found manuscript that's in conversation with Nabokov's Pale Fire from 1962.

Which also had a supposed lost great poem and long notes as well.

Look, I wonder if we've got time for me to tell you all about one other new release while we're on the, you know, building up our book list thing.

What do you reckon, Cassie?

It's by Ingrid Horrocks.

It's called All Her Life's Nine Stories.

And one of the reasons I was drawn to this is that we've had such a run of short stories over the last few weeks here on the bookshelf.

We talked about Lauren Groff's latest, Louise Edricks, and I noticed Colm Tabin has a new collection of short stories, The News from Dublin, out this week.

But this one by Ingrid Horrocks, she's a New Zealand writer, and she's

And all of her stories present pivotal moments in the lives of women across different timeframes.

And the opening story has a woman returning to New Zealand in 1919, having worked as a nurse in France.