Gray Robert Brown

It begins with an E. I famously order too much.

Shout out to friends of the podcast, Andrew and Marcus.

but it was worth it everything was brilliant yeah anyway back to the important order of the day so so famously the mary westmacott's were i think we've we've pretty roundly said on the podcast it's uh discrimination and erroneous but they famously have been described historically as romances yes so as indeed my 70s book of this shows which we all put up on our instagram

I would agree with you.

Is this the one that gives them all the reputation for being these somehow romantic novels?

Which, by the way, is to say, I mean, it's not romantic in the sense that it doesn't end happily ever after for one couple.

And Hugh Norris doesn't really understand what it is that's bewitching her, what it is that's pacifying her, until of course he does, until of course she turns around and goes, I'm going off with John Gabriel, and then it's a complete... But because we only see the novel through his eyes...

We can't see that either because he can't see that we're led into the world solely by him.

Well, I think you made the point and several other people have made the point about Unfinished Portrait when we were in Tenerife and we recorded that.

Yeah.

That really the joy of reading that book lies in the fact that you know it's an insight into Martha Christie, which is our perspective from 2026, reading those books, knowing it's her.

You don't need that, I guess, as you're saying, for The Rose and the Euclid.

No, no.

But yeah, the point of that is almost that nothing happens within the book because everything has happened before it.

No.

In my other guises working in audiobooks, I did an edition of The Castle of Otranto, like an 18th century, very early novel.

It was part of our classics range.

And I really vividly remember that when I was sort of looking up about the book, it's described as romance.

It's commonly described as romance.

There is nothing romantic about it.