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Alice and Bethany make a cheeky little top 10 of their favourite books of the year! Head to our Instagram for the full list.

Doing a spot of Christmas book shopping and thirsty for recommendations? Alice and Bethany have you covered. They each choose a fiction, a non-fiction, a food and drink, a reissue and the book they'd most like someone to give them.

Alice and Bethany catch up on what they've been reading, but it turns out it's been a weird reading year for them both. Much yapping lies ahead.

Alice and Bethany chat through a few of the books they're excited about for the rest of the year, and ask their author and bookseller friends for more recommendations! Because of the way we have to record episodes in advance, at least one of the books is already out, so if any of them sound good to you, it may be possible to read them already rather than wait!

Following the escandalo that has dogged the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us, Alice and Bethany discuss a few forthcoming adaptations of books, plus one that's taking up a lot of Alice's brain space, released on the same day as this episode...

Alice and Bethany look inward and discuss the two books Bethany has released this year! First up, Big Date Energy, aka what happens when you try to write a romcom where the main character is more like 'The Friend', and then Slowcoach, where we talk about how weirdly horrible and borderline traumatic PE lessons were.

Alice and Bethany talk through what they've been reading so far in 2024, and how not recording the pod has affected their reading habits.

Inspired by the New York Times' list of the 100 greatest books of the 21st Century, Alice and Bethany each compile their own top 10s, and find they have only one book in common, but don't agree on what that book is about... Bethany's list:  The Fact of a Body - Alex Marzano-Lesnevich What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt Manhattan Beach - Jennifer Egan Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides Crimson Petal & The White - Michel Faber  Fingersmith - Sarah Waters Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro Life After Life - Kate Atkinson Alice's list: A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata (trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori) Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado Just Kids - Patti Smith Lanny - Max Porter My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl - Andrea Lawlor Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt

Alice and Bethany have the huge pleasure of talking to girlie of the moment, Eliza Clark, largely about her new novel Penance but also about true crime, Tumblr, the wild success of Boy Parts and its upcoming stage adaptation!

Alice and Bethany have the great pleasure of talking to Heather Parry about her short story collection This Is My Body Given For You, which is a gnarly little thing full of troubling images and ideas. She also talks about the great work she does at the Society of Authors, and lots more!

Alice and Bethany have the great pleasure of talking to the film journalist and programmer Anna Bogutskaya about her new non-fiction book Unlikeable Female Characters! They take a dive into the world of 'unlikeable' women through film and TV from erotic thrillers to Skyler White via the Hays Code and Amy Dunne from Gone Girl.

Bethany has the huge pleasure of chatting to Virginia Sole-Smith about her revolutionary new book Fat Talk: Coming of Age in Diet Culture, which investigates the radical possibility of abandoning our cultural fears around 'childhood obesity' to create bodily autonomy in children and beyond.

Alice's debut novel, Death of a Bookseller, is out NOW! So obviously Bethany had to ask her all the nosy questions about it!

Alice and Bethany have a whale of a time with the funny, smart Katherine Heiny, author of the new collection Games and Rituals, as well as the novels Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser. Games and Rituals is out now!

Alice and Bethany atone for not putting out an episode for the first three months of the year by telling you all about everything they've read in the first quarter of 2023.

Alice and Bethany are BACK from their unplanned hiatus! And they've got a long, juicy episode for you about their favourite books of 2022, which obviously they should have recorded weeks ago... but didn't. Enjoy!

If you've been listening to WPAYO for a little while you'll know that a true Book of the Pod is Come Closer by Sara Gran. We are so hyped that she has a NEW book out, called The Book of the Most Precious Substance, and that we got to talk to her about it for this episode! The Book of the Most Precious Substance is out NOW from Faber!

Alice and Bethany have the great pleasure of interviewing Chelsea G Summers, author of the bloody and brilliant A Certain Hunger!

Alice and Bethany have the extreme joy of interviewing friend of the pod, thee Erin Kelly, author of Alice's fave, The Poison Tree and Bethany's fave, The Burning Air, as well as huge bestseller He Said She Said! Her new novel, The Skeleton Key, is out on September 1.

Alice and Bethany discuss the dark and delicious novella We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets, translated by Emma Rault. We Had To Remove This Post deals with the corrosive nature of repeated exposure to violence on a content moderator for a tech giant, and we loved it.

It's no secret that WPAYO loved Detransition, Baby - we dedicated a whole episode to it! So we're beyond delighted to speak to Torrey Peters ahead of the British Book Awards, where she's nominated in the Discover category. Detransition, Baby is out now in paperback!

Alice and Bethany go deep on Red Dragon by Thomas Harris as part of their Blockbusters series, since they both love Silence of the Lambs.

This week we had the huge pleasure of talking to literary legend Joanne Harris about her latest book, A Narrow Door, which is absolutely brilliant, thrilling and haunting. We also chatted about the great work done by the Society of Authors, and Joanne's generosity with informal creative writing education via Twitter! A delight.

Alice and Bethany go through the five books they're each planning to read in the near future. If you want to see a list of the books, head to the podcast Instagram or Twitter!

Alice and Bethany take a look at a few categories from the British Book Awards and chat through their thoughts and feelings, as well as trying to predict what will win. Lots of chat, speculation and conjecture!

Alice and Bethany take messy gal fic into a darker direction with New Animal by Ella Baxter, which is out now from Picador.

Alice and Bethany absolutely loved Coco Mellors' glittering debut Cleopatra & Frankenstein, a portrait of a marriage in early noughties NYC, and in this episode they get to ask the author all about it! The book is available now from 4th Estate. 

Bethany's adult debut novel is out NOW and she and Alice have a lil chat about the book and its creation!  You can buy it from Waterstones here - https://www.waterstones.com/book/welcome-to-your-life/bethany-rutter/9780008469948

Bethany attempts to keep calm as she and Alice meet Catherine Ryan Howard, author of several of the best 21st century thrillers, including her latest novel 56 Days. Catherine talks about her frankly fascinating writing process, her relationship with true crime, writing a 'lockdown novel' and loads and loads more. 

Alice and Bethany do a deep dive on the brilliant Notes On An Execution by Danya Kukafka, exploring the life and death of a murderer on death row and the women whose lives he affected.

Alice and Bethany get to sit down with the 21st century's answer to Agatha Christie, the excellent Lucy Foley! They chat all things murder mystery as they celebrate the launch of Lucy's latest thriller, The Paris Apartment, which is out now.

Over the past two months, Bethany has become obsessed with the crime author Attica Locke, so this episode is a little introduction to her major themes and her most famous novel Bluebird, Bluebird. 

Alice educates Bethany on the wonderful world of BookTok, a place that Alice is spending a lot of time these days. They talk virality, what makes a BookTok hit, and what publishers can do to hop on the TikTok train.

If you don't know about Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades, where have you been?! It's one of the most anticipated books of the year, and in the words of Raven Leilani, 'an ode to girlhood'. We've been so lucky to talk to Daphne on today's episode, and we hope you enjoy the chat and the book, which is out now from 4th Estate.

Alice and Bethany wrap up the year in style and let you know their respective top 10s of 2021! For a full list, please see our Instagram account for WPAYO!

She's sold over 2 BILLION COPIES and is the most-translated author in history. Alice has never read any Agatha Christie, so the WPAYO gals read And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express.

Jen Campbell is a Proper Expert on fairytales, especially as they relate to disability and disfigurement, so Alice and Bethany were extremely keen to talk to her about her new book, The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers And Other Gruesome Tales. They travel around the world discussing the fairytale tropes from different countries and continents and ask Jen all their burning fairytale questions like why disability is so prevalent in tales of yore.

What are the essential ingredients of a romantic interest? Are people gagging for escapism right now? Why do you love Twilight so much? These are all questions that baby romance author Bethany asked very well-established romance author Lindsey Kelk to celebrate the publication of her new novel, On A Night Like This!

Alice and Bethany celebrate the release of Tell Me I'm Worthless with an interview with the book's esteemed author Alison Rumfitt. A truly audacious addition to the great tradition of haunted house novels!

Alice and Bethany continue their slow and intermittent series on blockbuster books with an episode about Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Has it stood the test of time?

Bethany interviews the extremely interesting Calla Henkel about her phenomenal novel Other People's Clothes, which - if you listen to this podcast and enjoy Alice + Bethany's recommendations - you will almost certainly adore.

Alice and Bethany kick off Spooky Season with this rundown of 10 scary novels, from thrillers to horror to noir, that they rate in three very important categories. 

Alice and Bethany take a look at two recent reissues of novels about women getting *very* intimate with nature, Bear by Marian Engel and Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls.

Alice and Bethany do a rest-of-the-year reading tag as seen on Ariel Bissett's YouTube channel and talk about their plans, ruminate on ghostwritten books and start cautiously thinking about 2022 books.

Alice and Bethany navigate Rooney Fever by discussing the masterful marketing campaign by Faber for Beautiful World, Where Are You? which is released this week.

Alice and Bethany read each other the first line of five books from their TBR pile and try to guess what they're from.

Alice and Bethany take you through a non-comprehensive list of some translated fiction they've enjoyed for Women In Translation month.

Alice and Bethany take you through some quick reads: novellas to consume on a train journey, on the beach or chilling in a pub garden this summer.

Alice and Bethany are so lucky to be able to speak to Nina Mingya Powles, author of previous WPAYO fave Tiny Moons, about her new book, Small Bodies of Water. It's out now from Canongate and you can buy it at all good bookshops!

Alice and Bethany discuss The Service by Frankie Miren, a genuinely brilliant book that you should buy and read right now.

Alice and Bethany discuss the article Cat Person And Me by Alexis Nowicki and try to grapple with the question of whether it's okay to lift other people's lives to use as material in your writing.