Today's drug-fuelled podcast ventures into the underworld, with a pair of novels which look at ordinary people who get sucked into criminality.
Ned Beauman stages a confrontation between corporate power and Burmese revolutionaries on the streets of south London in his third novel, Glow. He tells us how he came up with his imaginary narcotic, why contemporary drug users aren't that bothered about what they're consuming and how to ride roughshod over genre conventions.
The ordinary person at the heart of Javier Cercas's Outlaws is Ignacio Cañas, the teenage son of a civil servant who falls in with a gangster and his girl in late 1970s Spain. Cercas explains how the novel began with a what-if question, why he built it out of interviews with three of the characters and whether the moments of incomprehension at the heart of his books are the heartbeat of all literature.
