Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

This was one of those novels that felt like it was written with a scalpel. The tension hums from the opening page and left me bristling with dread. There are some authors where you pick up one of their books and you know roughly what you will be getting. This is not true of Jo Baker, with The Body Lies a very different creature to Longbourn, the only other novel of hers that I had read. The only shared quality between the two was an exploration of fiction but where Longbourn dived into the back stories of the invisible characters, The Body Lies instead considers misogyny in fiction. A young and nameless writer accepts a university position teaching creative writing in the countryside. It is meant to be an escape from London, where she has been the victim of an assault. However, things become very complicated as rivalries emerge in her class and one particular student begins to submit highly disturbing pieces of work which seem to have the protagonist herself at their centre. Exploring sexual politics and the fetishisation of the female body, The Body Lies is a book that will stay with you long after completion and certainly into subsequent reading. The question up for discussion is why society is so fascinated with violence being done against women. Why does popular culture spend quite so much time salivating over images of women dead, dying or in pain? The Body Lies opens with a description of a pretty female corpse lying in the woods with snow gently dusting her blue-white skin. We then flit back to the narrator, heavily pregnant and abruptly assaulted by a stranger. Panicked, she is able to bite him and throw him off but he punches her. 'So this is what the world is like. I had no idea'. In the aftermath, the narrator tells everyone and herself that if the baby is ok, she is ok and despite the midwife's concern, her husband's advice is that they should all move on. And from there, we skip forward three more years to when she is caring for her adorable toddler, searching for a job outside of London all while her husband is reluctant to leave behind his teaching career in London.

Baker has experience teaching creative writing at Lancaster university and she has a rather vicious eye for skewering campus life. The narrator feels under qualified for the task, 'I’d been appointed to teach students how to write novels. It felt rather like asking someone who’d once crash-landed a light aircraft to train people as commercial airline pilots'. The person appointed to be her mentor is on a year's residency in Canada and the only other member of the department is on long-term sick leave. Suddenly she is the Creative Writing department with more and more work piling up in her in-tray. There's office politics, student drama and the rising claustrophobia of a situation slipping out of control.

The dynamics of the MA Creative Writing class begin as a pastiche but become increasingly troubling. There's a lawyer who is writing generic misogynistic crime fiction. When another student comments that the female characters are being punished for their sexuality, he smiles appreciatively that they have noticed his intent. Eyebrows are raised at the cliche of beginning a novel with a dead body, a meta-fictional knowing wink to The Body Lies itself. Another student is writing a werewolf novel, another is mining her own life. Their submissions intersperse the drama, alongside which stand the various witness statements around the later happenings make for a disorientating narrative, but intentionally so.

In and amongst it are musings on the life of the writer. During one tutorial, the narrator can see the lawyer looking round her tiny office and realising that even getting his crime novel published will not mean receiving a golden key, but rather just another office and likely one not as nice as the one he has now. This one feels like an insight straight from Jo Baker herself. More troublingly, the narrator reflects on the various ways in which her students are describing women and how the female characters are always reduced to their physical characteristics, 'I was struggling with my own question of whether there was a way to write female without writing body, and whether there was a way to be female without being reduced to body'. We joke about how men write women as 'she breasted boobily down the stairs', but it is grim how women's bodies are appropriated in fiction. Most disturbing of all though is Nicholas, a troubled student who insists that he has a personal rule that everything he writes has to be 'the truth'. But is his truth the same as that of other people?

This is definitely a novel that gave me heavy helpings of secondhand anxiety. Having chosen their cottage for its situation in the midst of the countryside, its isolation becomes an increasing source of worry not least because her husband has stayed with his job down in London. There is no mobile phone reception. The neighbours warn her testily to get a dog. A grief-stricken and confused woman is wandering the lanes. The nearby farmer is unfriendly. And the narrator's young son Sammy looks out the window in the evening and spots a man watching them.

The presence of the narrator's son Sammy lifts what would otherwise have been an unbearably grim story. In honesty, my recognition of Baker's depiction of motherhood was what connected me to an otherwise rather elusive central character. During one of her early days at our, she describes how she 'hurt' with missing him. There is also the rising panic as she notices him peaky and frets how if he is ill, he cannot go to nursery and if he cannot go, she cannot work and she has to work. There is the vivid description of his delight over his Christmas presents. The physical loveliness of holding her child sees the narrator through some of the novel's darkest moments. And always the sense that this little boy must be protected from the malevolence which is closing in.

The Body Lies is a tough read because its central character barely exists on the page. We know almost nothing about her because that is the way she wants it. She is seeing her life appropriated by Nicholas's writing, her child's life appropriated by him. She is a character being shoehorned into his narrative to serve his personal character arc. It is obscene. Of course she puts a distance between herself and the reader. She does not even want us to know her name. She is under attack from all sides. Her students think her as under qualified, her judgment is questioned, she is seen as too sexy, as not sexy enough, as too young or too old, to not be worth the price of their tuition - her every utterance is up for criticism. It's exhausting. She is exhausted. We all are.

When I first read the novel around publication, my thoughts came thick and fast. Too fast for a review. It is not an exaggeration that I think of The Body Lies whenever I read a book featuring a female corpse. Like a strange little Bechdel test, I ponder whether the violence in the novel is for decorative purposes, whether the corpse has any character or agency other then being beautifully deceased or if she exists solely to serve the male character arc. There is also the added question of sexual assault. The narrator describes how when she was a bookseller, she excitedly told an admired author that she was about to have her own first novel published. He congratulated her and then shortly afterwards bent down to tie his shoe and then ran his hand up her bare leg. With a character like Nicholas in the novel, it feels ominous to describe an incident as having the odour of truth but very similar things have happened to friends.

[spoiler]I was particularly disturbed to read other reviews which pondered whether an incident which occurred midway through the novel 'counted' as rape. There should be no ambiguity. It was rape. The fact that the narrator gave up resisting is explicitly stated to be from a fear of further violence. She was hit in the novel's opening pages. She does not want to be hit again. Her child is sleeping upstairs. She does not want him to wake up and come down to see his mother being raped. This is rape. As it states later in the novel, 'Giving up is not consent'. She describes her own self-disgust, awareness of her flab and stretch-marks exposed in this way. And then Nicholas reflects it all back to her in his next submission, mulling over what it had meant to sleep with a woman who had had a child. As if this was a flavour of ice cream he had never tried before. Women's bodies as commodities. Again, it is obscene. Alongside this, Baker also interrogates another toxic narrative trope around sexual violence. Reading Nicholas' submission, Patrick is jealous when he thinks that it is a sexual encounter. When the narrator explains that it was rape, he is pleased. Relieved. He is happy that she has been raped. Her rape would serve his romantic narrative. And that is a plot device that can eff right off.[/spoiler]



We can go on all day about why women take such a battering in fiction. We can go on all day about why this happens in real life too. Over this weekend alone, the Daily Fail have pondered whether the first female headteacher was murdered along with her child because she had the temerity to be more successful than her husband. Andrew Tate is still an icon of misogyny even if his 'empire' is built on lies. Misogyny plays out every day. But towards the end of the novel, another battered woman remarks to the narrator that there is no point in wondering why men do these things.

'It won't help you. I spent fifteen years trying to understand, and you know where it got me?'
I shook my head.
She touched the scabbed bridge of her nose: 'A&E'.

The Body Lies refuses to engage with the question of why some men hate women. It is about refusing to submit to the violence, refusing to submit to someone else's narrative that tries to cast you as a victim. It is about being 'one of those awkward characters that swerves off and goes its own way, that won't do what the author wants. Because all I'd wanted, all along, was not to be a part of his story. To be left alone to get on with mine'. Why should women have to suffer so that a man can experience some form of personal growth? Our stories are our own. The pen is in our hands. The pleasure in this book is seeing a woman take it up and fight back.

I loved the writing style of this book and really wanted to like it more than I did, but unfortunately I found parts disjointed and confusing at times.

I thought LONGBOURN was a beautiful tale so was eager to read the author's latest offering, THE BODY LIES. It was an engaging and melancholic read with a brooding atmosphere and a tense mystery.

Following our main unnamed character as her life changes after a sexually motivated attack as the lines between the truth and fiction get blurred and the relationship between herself and a student gets more and more complicated.
I would describe this book as a literary thriller, a slower-paced, quieter book that the usual mad dash that is a psychological thriller.
The book touches upon some really important topic, centring around what is essentially part of the #metoo movement - sexual attacks and manipulation by men among other topics (avoiding spoilers).
I recommend this book for fans of The Whisper Network and someone looking for a break from the usual high stakes fast-paced usual psychological thriller.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

The Body Lies begins with the assault of a thirty-year-old pregnant unnamed woman and the attack affects her life in the years that follow. She has her baby, and three years later, takes a job as a professor in a rural England university, living apart from her husband Mark, seeing him only at weekends. The department in which she works has reduced their staffing levels so more work is being constantly heaped upon her. With three year old Sammy to raise, a workload for one person to reasonably accomplish, and suffering from loneliness that stems from moving out of the city to the country, she is frazzled and very aware that she could be attacked again, at any time.

One of the students in her Masters writing class is Nick Baker, whose work – he claims – is always based on 'truth', and she (her character is never named) starts receiving increasingly disturbing submissions from him. The 'truth' gets ever darker particularly after the narrator begins to recognise herself as a main player in his book.

There is an indisputable claustrophobic nuance to the story, both physical and imagined and highlighted by the presence of the narrator's boss who always seems to be occupying her personal space. Nick is constantly present in her thoughts even when he's not around her and I had such a palpable feeling of dread throughout reading The Body Lies.

A compelling and graspable read that makes valid points about the ways in which gender and power shape or moderate our culture.

I received a complimentary copy of this novel at my request from Transworld Publishers/ Doubleday via NetGalley and this review is my unbiased opinion.

loved this book - would 100% recommend and am looking forward to reading what this author writes next!

I am very impressed how multifaceted an author Jo Baker is! She writes histories, fictional biographies, Jane Austen pastiche. In "The Body Lies" she decided to try something new yet again - a psychological thriller set in one of the universities of North England.

The protagonist, whose name we never learn, is invited to teach Creative Writing course and, taking this opportunity, she moves away from her husband, rents a somewhat derelict cottage in a small village and embraces her new job. I loved this part of the book: the humorous descriptions of everyday life of academia, the interesting discussion between the protagonist and her students and the wide array of sample chapters of wannabe authors (all interesting and very different!). One of the students declares that he writes "only what is true" and becomes a bit difficult to manage. Now here starts the "thriller" part of the novel - the relationship between our protagonist and her unruly student. Where does it lead? Read to find out.

I very much enjoyed the teaching part of the story, the wonderful descriptions and very involving story, the thriller was a bit lacking in suspense and the reveal was somewhat of a let down.

I've had a string of really great reads recently, so that's how I know The Body Lies has something extra special about it; it made its mark on me and shot to the top of my already excellent recent-reads list. I was completely sucked in from the opening sentence and it didn't disappoint. An experience made even more enjoyable as I really didn't know what to expect from this novel. Maybe I liked it so much because it also struck me on a visceral level; the (unnamed) lead character has a three-year-old son called Sam, as do I, and Jo Baker is so good at keeping a high level of tension thrumming throughout, that every time Sam was mentioned, my heart contracted for fear something would happen to him. I couldn't not imagine my little Sammy.

The Body Lies starts with our narrator being attacked on the street when pregnant, which affects her (as you would imagine), then when she's offered a job as a creative writing lecturer at a university 'up North', she's more than happy to leave the dangerous streets of London for quiet village living. Her husband, Mark, however, is not. So they start a long-distance marriage situation (he visits at the weekends) but this leaves her essentially isolated, juggling motherhood and a full time job, alone. We learn about her students through the creative writing pieces they are working on in her class. It's one particular student, Nicholas, who pushes all boundaries with his tutor and tries to blend reality and fiction with his writing, with dramatic consequences.

The students' work brings in a stories within the story element; the tone of voice switches effortlessly between each student's work and adds thought-provoking moments about the writing process, character stereotypes and what the reader expects when they pick up a book. Jo Baker then seamlessly executes the literary critique she talks about, cleverly creating story threads that subvert your expectations. 

That said, in places the narrator's behaviour jarred as I found myself thinking, 'well, that's not how I would have reacted in that situation' BUT this is not a book written from my POV, it would be really weird if it was. She is written as a strong, independent woman who makes her own choices, and certainly not the ones that are assumed of her, or thrust upon her. That's why I found this such an engrossing read, plus it had the perfect tone, pace, exciting sense of danger, knife-edge atmosphere and some classic thriller elements thrown into the mix too. All this meant I literally couldn't stop reading The Body Lies. An intelligent page-turner, I highly recommend it!

When does fiction cross that line, become real, so real that you don’t quite not want to believe it. Baker’s The Body Lies was a novel that brilliantly explored that scenario and was chilling and very clever in its telling.

It was Baker’s ability to write so distinctly, in the voices of her two main protagonists, the outlying characters slipped in that this gave this novel that added extra dimension.

We never knew the name of our Creative Writing Lecturer, whose marriage seemed on the brink, but who adored her small son. It was a new beginning, a chance to put the horror of an attack behind her and to discover her real self in a safe and creative environment. But life sometimes never lives up to expectations and as she was piled with more and more work, the students in her MA group seemed to jangle her nerves and you could sense an uneasiness creep in. Baker gave us the feeling that she was balanced on a knife edge, a simmering tension that something or someone could tip the precariousness of her situation at any time, it was just a matter of how and when.

Baker threw in Nicholas, slightly odd, his writing tinged with nuance and frightening reality. It was the interplay between her and Nicholas that intrigued, that drew you in, that crackled with atmosphere and tension. Would something happen, what would happen and when? What I liked was that it wasn’t one dramatic event but a build up of individual incidents, of a persons story unfolding, the nuances of their psyche slowly revealed. You wanted to read quicker but Baker made us wait, dangled titbits in front of us before a drama filled final few pages wrapped up the loose ends and gave us a deeply satisfying ending.

I admired Baker’s structure as she interwove the students writing into the narrative, used it to reveal their characteristics , the reasons for their actions and behaviours. The novel brilliantly highlighted the differing interpretations we can each have, of not only the written word but also the way in which we talk, act and are perceived by our peers.

I loved the frisson of sexual tension, jealousy, the understated yet important themes of mental health that simmered throughout. The novel thrilled but not in the way of your usual thriller, it had more about it than that. It had much more of a contemporary feel that was thought provoking and intelligent and one that I cannot recommend highly enough.

This was a fast paced and interesting thriller. The main character was well rounded and developed for the most part but she did feel a bit like an unreliable narrator. It would have been nice if this had been from more than one view point but the sections of creative writing and witness statements did help with that. The final section was drama filled and kept me on the edge of my seat but the ending was a little bit messy compared to the rest of the text.

The Body Lies is an incredibly well written thriller about a young unnamed female writer who, following a sexual assault and the birth of her first child, takes a job as a Professor of Creative Writing. She and her son relocate to the country, leaving her husband to commute from London at the weekends.

Her problems set in from the start. A lack of staff in the Department means a hectic workload. Isolation and childcare issues become apparent. The separation takes its toll on our narrators’ relationship. Moreover, that is before she deals with her students whose expectations and attitudes bring their own pressures and who have strong opinions on their tutor and on each other’s writing.

The Body Lies is part campus novel, part thrillers and succeeds on both counts. The narrative is fragmentary featuring samples of the student’s work, departmental reports and workplace emails to create a story, which questions the very nature of the stories we tell and the use of violence as a narrative device.

This thriller thrills without relying on one of those ubiquitous twists and asks the reader to question why we read the fictions we read and why they exist in the first place.

I first heard about The Body Lies at Newark book festival so this review will be relatively short as I have discussed some things in the review of the event I attended there.

I am not going to lie and say this was an easy book to read because it wasn’t. There were some things that were very hard to read. One of those things was the incident which caused the protagonist to want to move somewhere more remote.

“It was on the busy, dirty Anerly Road in South London that the man hit me.”

She was pregnant when the incident happened and had never managed to feel safe again even years later. Her husband didn’t quite understand why she still couldn’t stop thinking about it years later. From a woman’s perspective though I think it is easy to see why she couldn’t just forget about it.

“I went to dodge past him, but he sidestepped into my path. I back away but he comes with me; every move was anticipated. And all the time he was talking, his breath on my face. The smell of him…. So this is what the world is like. I had no idea.”

Three years later she has stopped talking about it but she still thinks about it all the time and never feels safe, so she decides she needs to find a job somewhere else and move. The only snag is when she eventually finds somewhere her husband is reluctant to move with her because he doesn’t want to leave his job. In the end they decide that she will take the job and leave with their three-year-old son and he will stay in London and they will visit each visit whenever possible.

The cottage she moves to seems to her to contain the safety she was looking for but there are clues for the reader from the beginning if you care to look.

“The car dipped down the hill and round the bend and out of sight. And I felt it then, the first ripple of apprehension. Now it was just me and Sam and the empty countryside and undifferentiated time till Monday morning and not a soul that I knew, not for hundreds of miles.”

Her name job was to tech students how to write a novel, a job which she felt vastly underqualified for. The course provides a whole host of unusual characters for the reader to interact with and each one provides extracts from their work thus introducing a variety of writing styles into the novel.

Jo Baker certainly knows how to give a reader the chills. One such moment was when she is in the cottage with her son on a rainy evening and Sammy sees something.

“What do you see Sammy?”

He leaned in closer, breath misting the pane, eyes narrowing. And he said, “man.”

When I heard this extract at Newark book festival it gave me the creeps even though it was the middle of the day and I had to buy the book.

I mentioned earlier in the review that The Body Lies wasn’t always the easiest read and there was one particular bit which could prove difficult reading. This extract does contain a SPOILER and a scene of sexual assault. The reason I chose to include the extract is that perfectly illustrates the importance of consent.

“I let it happen, because it was going to happen anyway, and this way it would happen without me getting hit.

While he fucked me I was cold and sore and tired and also kind of bored. I wanted it out. I felt old, and fat and ugly and disgusting…

And he said, ‘it’s okay, it’s okay.’ He touched my chin. It really wasn’t okay. It was very far from okay, but I wasn’t going to say that.”

So, like I said it wasn’t an easy read by any means but it was a great one.

This book is dark and gritty and extremely well written. It is slow moving at times but I feel that this works really well
The author manages to write about rape and sexual assault in such a sensitive manner.
Excellent read

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for this arc. I’ve heard lots of positive things about this book so was excited to see what the hype was about. However I’m afraid I found this a disappointing read.
It’s tricky to explain the plot without giving too much away. This follows a young writer who’s attacked by a stranger but manages to escapes unscathed. But the effects still linger and years later she accepts a creative writing tutor role in an university. Things are going fine until something traumatic happens and a student starts to submit fiction that closely resembles her life...
I think for me overall the problem was that the plot was too slow-going. It isn’t until the second half things start to happen and the climax is resolved using overly familiar tropes and coincidences. Some characters felt cliched and the story goes in a predictable direction. I did, however, enjoy the metafiction element of the novel and scenes in the seminars when the characters were discussing fiction. It’s 3/5 from me.

How cool is that cover!! This book is dark, gritty, atmospheric, and brooding, and contains many of the suspenseful and thrilling components I've previously loved in the twisty new novels, yet with a more relaxed pace. Nice book

Do you ever feel so angry with a book character that you want to leap inside the pages and thwack him/her (but usually him, let's be honest) around the head with the very spine of the book itself? This is brilliantly written but made me feel almost cross-eyed with rage, not only with [Nicholas (hide spoiler)] but also [Mark (hide spoiler)]. There are echoes of Kate Atkinson's Emotionally Weird in the pitch-perfect skewering of the creative writing students' terrible manuscripts. However, about two-thirds of the way through it seemed to run out of steam slightly and settle into becoming a run-of-the-mill psychological thriller.

This was a creepy, disturbing, clever thriller. It was a page turner. Not enjoyable, because there's nothing to enjoy as content, but it was very successful. If you like dark thrillers, with unlikeable characters, it's for you.
thanks a lot Netgalley and the publisher for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

When I reviewed Jo Baker’s book A Country Road, A Tree (shortlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017), I described it as ‘clever, literary and powerful’. I feel the same adjectives can be applied to The Body Lies, the author’s foray into the psychological thriller genre but a book which still retains a distinctly literary feel.

Perhaps it’s brave (or maybe a sign of confidence in one’s ability) to write a novel in which the main character is leading a creative writing MA course and lecturing on the craft of writing. Our narrator, a debut novelist, certainly wonders about her qualification for the task. ‘I’d been appointed to teach students how to write novels. It felt rather like asking someone who’d once crash-landed a light aircraft to train people as commercial pilots.’ However, I reckon the author must have had fun creating the extracts from the work the students submit for critique as part of their course, ranging in genre as they do from hard-boiled crime to fantasy, short stories and something altogether more disturbing.

The Body Lies starts with a description of the body of a young woman so I gave a little chuckle when the critique the students give on the crime novel one of them, Steven, is writing focuses on that same aspect. “First thought is,” Nick said, one thumbnail still scraping at the other, “does it have to start with a dead woman?” “Well, that’s how these stories work,” Steven said. “That’s the story engine that powers the novel, so yeah, it does really.” Steven is criticised for using the dead girl merely as a device. Interestingly, the reader never learns the name of the protagonist of The Body Lies as if that aspect of her identity is not important. (The main character in A Country Road, A Tree was also unnamed, although in that book was easily identifiable as Samuel Beckett.)

The depiction of women in fiction is just one of the aspects of the position of women explored in The Body Lies. From practical issues, such as the pressure of balancing childcare and work, to, as the narrator sees it, men’s ‘sense of entitlement to a woman’s attention, and her body’, the latter powerfully played out in the opening chapter. And along the way, the book also explores topics such as the need for trigger warnings, safeguarding, student mental health and the pressure of workloads and course retention targets on staff in academic institutions.

It’s not all serious though and I really enjoyed the playful humour I detected. For example, at one point, in response to the narrator’s concern about the work submitted by one of her students, her colleague, Mina, replies, “He’s probably playing some tricksy postmodern game.” Expressing her concern the student might drop out, Patrick, another colleague, asks her, “He’s the real deal then?” She replies, “Yeah, I think he probably is.” Patrick responds, “Well, then he’ll write it anyway, won’t he, MA or no MA.” (I can imagine Will Self nodding in agreement at that point.)

Fans of the genre can rest assured The Body Lies incorporates many of the familiar characteristics of a psychological thriller. There’s a creepy and possibly unbalanced individual with an unhealthy obsession. The narrator and her young son find themselves renting a house in a remote, isolated location which also happens to be in a mobile phone black spot. Initially, she’s not worried and reflects ‘I rather liked being unreachable.’ That’s probably going to change, I’m sure you’re thinking. Too right. There are scenes in the book that will definitely make you want to check you’ve locked your doors. The observant reader may note a passing reference to an event the significance of which will only become apparent towards the end of the book. (No doubt the sort of advice about plot construction you’d expect a creative writing group to give.)

If this review is making you wonder if The Body Lies is just too clever and whether it actually works as a psychological thriller, I can reassure you it definitely does. There is tension, drama and sense of jeopardy aplenty as the book reaches it eventful conclusion. As everything slots into place, I can’t do better than echo the words of our unnamed narrator: ‘That’s how stories work: there’s something instinctively satisfying about circularity.’ This reader was definitely satisfied and can’t wait to see what Jo Baker writes next.