Our host Vick Hope is joined by broadcaster Angela Scanlon.

Angela is best known for hosting shows on the BBC and RTÉ as well as her weekend breakfast show on Virgin Radio. Her first major documentary, Oi Ginger! aired in 2014, trending worldwide and showcasing her ability to dig deep into a subject matter. The success of the show led to a follow-up series, Angela Scanlon: Full Frontal, where she tackled taboo subjects such as extreme makeovers, fitness and nudity. Since beginning her work with the BBC, Angela has hosted The One Show and cult classic Robot Wars alongside Dara O’Brien, as well as coverage of T In The Park and the BAFTAs. In 2022 Angela published her debut book Joyrider: How Gratitude Can Help You Get The Life You Really Want. Part memoir, part self-help guide, Joyrider sees Angela chart her own journey into the world of self-development. This year has seen Angela launch the Get A Grip podcast, alongside co-host Vicky Pattison. Described as the ultimate group chat, Angela and Vicky discuss everything from motherhood and navigating newly-wed life to pop culture, internet drama and much more. She’s also the founder of jewellery brand frkl. and the online community, Hot Messers.

Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Angela’s five most influential books by women.

[Marian Keyes] is a genius in the way that she crafts characters that you know in your bones. There’s such wit, and warmth, and tenderness, and heartache in the mundane everyday lives that we all lead, and the complexities within the family structure, and the car crash moments that we all have in our lives. There’s such a beautiful kindness in the way that she approaches those stories; nobody’s ever the victim and there’s no judgment, they’re always very hopeful. She speaks to [difficult] subjects in a way that’s real and also kind of funny.

I think when I had my daughter I was met with the version of myself that I’d been running away from for 20 years. […] It’s motherhood in all its gory detail and the wild change to self and identity, and the sense of disappearing in service of this little human, and the expectation that a mother is born at the same time as the child. […] I think [Claire Kilroy] speaks really profoundly to this resentment that so many women will be familiar with in spite of themselves and in spite of their best efforts to not go down that route, because this everyday getting up, doing the washing, going for a walk in the park, looking at your watch – the day flies by but also drags. If you’ve built a life where you have independence and think ‘is this me forever?’, you can feel like that’s never going to end. […] There’s a frantic, manic energy to this book that feels uncomfortably familiar.

I think books, films, whatever it is, sometimes we cannot access our own feelings or release our own feelings, and the best art to my mind allows us to grieve on behalf of this character, where you’re releasing some things that you didn’t know were stuck in your hips. […] There’s no punctuation, there’s no beginning, middle or end of a sentence, there’s no paragraphs, it’s this stream of consciousness where you don’t know if she’s talking or he’s talking, is she saying it out loud or in her head, is that dialogue? There’s this wild energy and urgency to it that just plants you.

I think [Louise Kennedy] is this magical force of nature, and yet this book is beautiful and poetic and wildly romantic and just gorgeous. It’s a look into The Troubles and that period in time is depicted in many ways, more so now than it has been in a very long time, but this actually to me shows a universality to anywhere where there is turmoil, political or civil; that love and everyday family dynamics happen in the backdrop of these things, and sometimes we can zoom out and look at that place and make an assumption about the people that inhabit that place. For me, this is a Hollywood love story set in Belfast at a time when it was dangerous to be in love.

It’s funny. The chapters are short, you can dip in and out of it, but I think she’s so razor sharp with her observations. It’s ‘women’s topics’ but there’s this wit and warmth, it’s wonderfully full in the descriptives and tangents she goes off on, and I think it’s a joy to devour.

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