Mark Sutton

No one expected it to come out.

And I'm going to join in the chorus of praise and say that I think it's probably his best album since, at the very least, since 2001 when he released an album called Love and Theft, which was also very good.

But for someone who's almost 80 to release an album of this quality, where the lyrics are so precise and poignant and inventive, I'm proud of my boy.

I think he's shown that he earned that Nobel Prize.

She's incredible.

I suppose one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot, you know, while we've been in isolation, is the possibility of not travelling for potentially many years from now, or at least leaving Australia.

That's also partly because, as you mentioned before, I have small kids now.

And one of the things I always used to do when I was travelling is I always try and read books set in the places I'm travelling to.

And as a result, I have kind of a lot of warm feelings towards particular books that I read in the locations they were set.

And two that sprung to mind recently that I thought I'd like to revisit them were James Plunkett's Strumpet City, which is set in Dublin.

and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, which is set in New Orleans, both of which I read during trips to those places, and they had a profound effect on me.

Plunkett's Strappet City is a novel that was hugely popular when it came out in the late 60s, and you hear about it now and then, but it's not really in the zeitgeist, and I think it's a slightly undervalued classic.

It's set in the Dublin labour lockout of 1913, and in contrast to...

A book like Ulysses, that other great epic Dublin novel, it's a very realistic and grounded novel with dozens of characters.

It's a novel of characters in many ways with many, many different stories from Rashes, the tramp character, right up to the men at the top of the factories and everything who are running things.

And it paints this incredible portrait of...

Ireland and Dublin on the cusp of the War of Independence and the sort of events that led to this national consciousness that would explode a few years later.

It's certainly, I think, a novel that deserves to be mentioned more often as one of the great books, certainly one of the great Dublin novels to have been written.

Well, of course, there's a lot of great books set in New Orleans, but The Awakening, you know, it's a classic.

I'm sure a lot of listeners have read it, but it begins on an island in the Mexican Gulf and then moves to New Orleans later.