NPR's Book of the Day

Today on the show: Fictional and nonfictional takes on extraterrestrial life. Steven Rowley’s new novel Take Me With You is about a man whose husband is abducted by aliens. The author says the premise stemmed from one he often discusses with his own husband: If you had the chance to be taken by aliens, would you go? In today’s episode, Rowley speaks with NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe about the novel’s “will...

Sportswriter Joe Posnanski and TV writer Michael Schur say their new book is for everyone who has risked their emotional health over a sports team. Big Fan took the co-authors across the United States and beyond as they investigated fans of football, chess, Taylor Swift and more. In today’s episode, they tell NPR’s Scott Simon about how a video from the Worlds Dart Championship led them on their i...

In his debut novel, the civil rights attorney Ben Crump imagines a horrific crime that feels all too real. In Worse Than a Lie , a Black ex-police officer is shot 10 times by white officers in Chicago. The book’s hero Attorney Beau Lee Cooper must find out what actually happened in order to seek justice. In today’s episode, Crump joins NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe for a conversation about writing a “legal...

Acclaimed author Sara Nović lost her hearing at age 12. Since then, she’s learned ASL, written the best-selling novel True Biz, mothered two children, and even discovered a knack for playing the piano — something she feels, rather than hears. Nović’s new memoir, Mother Tongue, follows her journey from teenagehood through motherhood as she grapples with a tough but fascinating question: What is a p...

Martha Raddatz has reported on the U.S. military for more than 30 years. Now she’s out with a new book: The Hero Next Door: Stories of Patriotism and Purpose. It’s a collection of veterans’ stories from her years covering war on the frontlines and from the Pentagon. It’s important, Raddatz tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep, “to know the people who are over there performing these duties for us.” In today’s...

Writing is hard. So is writing about writing. And, sometimes, reading about writing. But today, we have two books that attempt to break down the literary creative process into manageable pieces. Three Six Five is author Lucy Ives’ collection of individual writing prompts for each day of the year. She sits down with NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss the book, along with why she believes “the best time t...

In 1839, conjoined twins and famous showmen Chang and Eng Bunker — native to Thailand, then called Siam — took a break from touring, settled in North Carolina, bought a slave plantation, and married two American sisters. The interracial union caused a public scandal for more reasons than one, and their story is the inspiration for Christina Baker Kline’s novel The Foursome. In today’s episode, Bak...

Cherry Baby is a novel of perceptions. Cherry thought life couldn’t get worse when her ex-husband turned her into a caricature for his popular comic strip — curves, double-chin and all. But then the comic gets a film adaptation, and another problem appears: Every Hollywood actress who could have played the Cherry-inspired character is now too thin, thanks to weight-loss drugs. In today’s episode,...

The history of Jewish revolutionary groups is fraught with complexity, violence and surprise — as author Molly Crabapple discovered when she traveled across eastern Europe to dig through the archives of her ancestors. Her journey is the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country. In it, Crabapple reveals the largely-forgotten history of the Jewish Labor Bund: a secular, anti-Zionis...

A Perfect Hand has all the ingredients of a charming Victorian romance novel: a scheming matchmaker plot, an upstairs-downstairs dynamic, and a hefty dose of petticoats. But author Ayelet Waldman also explores what lies beneath the shiny historical romanticism. When protagonist and lady's maid Alice partners with an attractive valet to set up their wealthy employers, she discovers there could be m...

In Ilona Bannister’s Five, five strangers wait on a train platform. One will die in the next five minutes but only one person knows: the reader. In Anthony Horowitz’s A Deadly Episode, his real 2018 novel The Word is Murder becomes a fictional film adaptation with one problem: the actor playing the protagonist is dead. Today’s episode features conversations on metafiction with both authors. First,...

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a foundational legal scholar, theorist, and Civil Rights advocate, known for coining such significant and controversial terms as intersectionality and Critical Race Theory. But what — or who — inspired her work? Crenshaw examines just this in her new memoir Backtalker, which delves into her past, and the legal cases that shined light on complex and underresearched str...

Becks is a queer teenager in the 1980s struggling to find a sense of belonging. When she picks up an unfinished coding project left behind by her beloved late uncle, she isn’t quite prepared for her efforts to ripple centuries into the future. Told in the years 1983, 2090, and 2586, Portia Elan’s novel Homebound weaves Becks’ story with that of future humans who experience similar struggles in a v...

What does it truly mean to be a “prodigy?” For the poet, professor and author of The People Can Fly Joshua Bennett, the answer is complicated. But maybe telling stories can help. In The People Can Fly, Bennett explores the lives and legacies of Black prodigies throughout history — including himself — by blending memoir, folklore and history into one book. In today’s episode, Bennett joins NPR’s Mi...

Time is running out for 17-year-old Jay Gardiner: He’s trapped underwater in the body of a sperm whale with just one hour of oxygen left. This not-so-typical situation is the premise for Whalefall, the 2023 thriller from Daniel Kraus. Kraus won a 2026 Pulitzer for Angel Down, his genre-bender told in a single sentence. But Whalefall experiments with structure through its chapters, their shrinking...

Today’s episode spotlights two new books all about running. The Long Run is a history of the marathon by author and running coach Martin Dugard. He spoke with NPR’s A Martínez about why so many people aspire to run 26.2 miles, from the history of the marathon in ancient Athens to the 1970s running boom. Then, Mary Cain was a child running prodigy. But she faced physical and emotional abuse at the...

It’s been 30 years since Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass arrived on U.S. shores. The award-winning British fantasy classic tells the story of Lyra, a precocious and rebellious pre-adolescent girl who is abandoned to be raised as an orphan at Oxford University. Lyra’s world is populated by animal companions known as demons, a religious organization called the Magisterium and a mysterious substa...

For Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah and Israeli Maoz Inon, their bond of mutual understanding evolved from a place of tremendous pain. Both men saw members of their family killed by the other side before, or during, the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, prompting them to trek through the Holy Land to explore the contentious landscape — together. In today’s episode, Abu Sarah and Inon join Here & Now ’s Indira Laksh...

In a new mystery novel, a group of struggling writers lands on a private island belonging to bestselling author Arthur Fletch. But Fletch is dead and the authors, who come from a number of genres, must race to come up with the best ending to his unfinished manuscript. Then, the competition turns deadly. The Ending Writes Itself is by V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, who wrote the novel under the pen na...

We meet the unnamed narrator of Mark Helprin's new novel Elegy In Blue when he’s 82-years-old. He was a man of wealth and standing but has wound up alone in a subsidized studio apartment in Brooklyn. Through war and violence, he’s lost his father, his son, and his wife. Now, the narrator says, “his allegiance is to ghosts.” In today’s episode, Helprin joins NPR’s Scott Simon for a conversation abo...

Journalist Jodi Kantor and Harvard happiness expert Arthur Brooks are both out with new books about identifying and cultivating meaning in one’s life. Brooks says he wanted to write The Meaning of Your Life after observing an explosion in depression and anxiety among young people beginning around 2008. In today’s episode, he chats with Here & Now ’s Indira Lakshmanan about how neglecting right-bra...

Lena Dunham shot the pilot for the HBO series Girls at age 24. Quickly, she was launched into the creative spotlight but the author says she was not prepared for “everything that came with it.” In her new memoir Famesick , Dunham recounts the “Wild West” of the 2010s, which included her rapid creative education, chronic health issues, and intense bonds with her Girls co-stars. In today’s episode,...

In Julia Langbein’s new novel, a woman named Jean is in turmoil over her past. She has rediscovered a diary from 1998, when she was 17-years-old, and spots a judgemental comment about Monica Lewinsky. Now 45 and remembering her own mistakes, Jean calls out to Lewinsky – and her prayers are answered. In today’s episode, Langbein joins NPR’s Elissa Nadworny for a discussion about Dear Monica Lewinsk...

During the second week of the Covid lockdown, Belle Burden’s husband ended their 20-year marriage and became “someone [she] did not recognize.” Their divorce and the affair that prompted it came as a shock to Burden, who says she had been happily married, enjoying “cozy” time with their family in Martha’s Vineyard. She recounts her story in Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage , which is now in its nin...

James Wolff is the pseudonym of a former British intelligence officer who now writes espionage novels. His latest, Spies and Other Gods , follows the Head of British Intelligence at the tail end of a long and successful career who feels that his mental acuity is beginning to slip away. In the midst of this brain fog, Sir William Rentoul must join forces with intelligence teams across Europe to tra...