You are about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about what goes into making one.

I'm Sadata Sese, an assistant commissioner of podcasts for BBC Sounds.

I pull a lot of levers to support a diverse range of podcasts on all sorts of subjects,

relationships, identity, comedy, even one that mixes poetry, music and inner city life.

So one day I'll be helping host develop their ideas, the next fact-checking, a feature,

and the next looking at how a podcast connects with its audience, and maybe that's you.

So if you like this podcast, check out some others on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Today we storm the barricades, defy convention and challenge the status quo, at least as much as we can within the confines of a BBC studio.

We discussed the subversive female protagonist in

Tessa Hadley's new novel. Richard Beard contemplates the disruptive nature of mother time,

and we chat to two pioneering female booksellers very much doing their own thing.

We start with Free Love, the eighth novel from writer Tessa Hadley, whose keen descriptive powers

and uncanny ability to inhabit her characters, have been praised by many, including Chimamanda

and Gossi Adichie and Hilary Mantel. As with Hadley's previous novels, including Everything

Will Be All Right and The Past,

the setting is familial.

Free love opens in the 1960s with a comfortably married suburban couple, Roger and Phyllis,

having their friend's son, Nikki, over for dinner.

It's the start of an illicit affair, which becomes a mirror for broader social upheaval as Phyllis leaves her children to find herself in Bohemian London.

And I'm delighted to say that Tessa Hadley joins me now in the studio. Welcome to Open Book. It's lovely to be here, Elizabeth. It's so lovely to have a year in person. Now,

there are two 1960s in your book, aren't there? There's the one epitomized by Nikki, who's busy

...