Geordie Williamson

speaker

728 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2018 last heard 21 Aug

Geordie Williamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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The Bookshelf · Elizabeth Strout returns, Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear and more new fiction · 8 May 2026 podcast

She adores her grandmother, even if she doesn't get along with her mum, Bube, who is, I think, although it's not made explicit, uh a Holocaust survivor.

So it's a middle-class American Jewish family with a wild young granddaughter and daughter who is grieving at the novel's outset at the loss of her beloved uncle, the one person that she really felt that she could connect with, particularly because of her problem with her mum, but who has died of something she discovers is called G-R-I-D.

But it's basically.

An early iteration of what became to be known as AIDS.

So the knowledge of her uncle's death is made worse by the secrets that swirl around it, the shame that attends to it.

His sexuality was a secret that he kept from her, although he tried to contact her multiple times before his final death, and she, to her eternal shame, refused to talk to him.

But

He leaves for her some floppy discs.

And those discs contain a game.

And we're talking about nineteen eighty-three.

This is really early coding.

But it's a period where there's a lot of kind of utopian thinking in Silicon Valley and across the world about what coding might enable human beings to do, the way that it might allow connection, allow exploration, allow a kind of democratic play of imagination.

You know, then and we thought about the early internet was

Going to be like this as well, and look how that played out.

But at this moment of utopian possibility, these floppy discs become a way for the young woman who has an interest in coding and who indeed shares a sense of outsidedom with her uncle, who nonetheless kind of hid it better.

And she takes on the challenge that he set out for her of complaining.

completing the game that he started writing for her.

Yeah, look, the Babylon.

Um, and I found this the most kind of, you know, thrilling and obviously, you know, kind of um free, uh freely imaginative strand of the novel.

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