David Gaunt

In fiction, Elizabeth Strout's brought her out of retirement.

She's in more senior retirement now and the ex-maths teacher in a little town in Maine.

And Elizabeth Strout pulls no punches.

I think she's been able to use Olive Kitteridge as a way of being so brutally frank and honest.

It's almost as if this woman has no filters at all.

And that stands, just like in the first Olive Kitteridge, there are interconnected stories, including people dragged out of other novels she's written earlier about the brothers.

Yeah, and that's Olive Again is the title of it.

I thought it was fantastic.

It's beautiful.

And the third one, which is a marvellous bit of fun, is called The Grammarians by Catherine Shine, a New York writer whom I confess I hadn't read.

though she's been around a while, and it's about identical twins, Daphne and Laurel, who are obsessed with words from their birth, in fact, preternaturally.

So when their mother says, stop that fracker, or maybe she says frackers, I don't know what they say in America, this instance, while they're in their cot, they smile at each other and stop crying immediately because...

They found a new word.

And that's a good premise by which they make their way through life, except they are identical twins, which means they can never get away from each other and also never be away from each other.

And we do follow their lives through their word obsessed.

On the plinth in the house at home is the Merriam-Webster's dictionary, that massive thing.

And that becomes the question of the custody of that item after the death of their father becomes something which may drive them apart forever.

So there's a lot of stings in the tale, but it's a charming, beautiful, witty thing.

That sounds great.

Yeah, he is, I agree.