NPR's Book of the Day

Sigrid Nunez – author of novels like The Friend and What Are You Going Through – is out with a new collection of short stories. It Will Come Back to You features characters like a middle-age daughter coping with her mother’s memory loss, a Brad Pitt lookalike and a housekeeper working at a luxury hotel in Manhattan. In today’s episode, Nunez joins Here & Now’s Tiziana Dearing for a conversation about the familial relationships in the collection. The author also shares writing advice from Elizabeth Hardwick and Kurt Vonnegut.

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French footballer Kylian Mbappé was one of the World Cup's biggest stars this summer, despite France's loss to Spain in the semifinals. ESPN soccer correspondent Julien Laurens has written a new book called Kylian Mbappé: The Definitive Biography, which details the soccer star’s upbringing and path to becoming a sports prodigy. In today's episode, Laurens speaks with Here & Now's Scott Tong about how Mbappé has grown over his career and how – like many of our greatest athletes – he's "wired differently."

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In preparation for an upcoming trip to Ireland, All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly has been tearing through Tana French's books. French is the queen of Irish crime fiction and has authored the popular Dublin Murder Squad series, among other novels. In today’s episode, Kelly and French talk about traveling through fiction, how land ownership looms large in the Irish psyche and how French gives her fiction a sense of place. Then, the author shares her recommendations for summer reads set in Ireland.

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Ray Carney is a furniture salesman in Harlem with a long-running side hustle. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy follows the character as he descends into crime across decades in a rapidly changing New York. Cool Machine is the third and final book in that series. In today’s episode, Whitehead speaks with Weekend Edition’s Ayesha Rascoe about Carney as a divided soul. They also chat about gentrification in 1980s Harlem and how Whitehead brought his own version of New York into the world of the book.

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In two new novels, city folk are thrown into life in the country. The Great Wherever is a multigenerational story told through ghosts. A woman living in Washington, D.C. learns she’s inherited her father’s share of a family property, a piece of farmland in Tennessee. In today’s episode, author Shannon Sanders chats with Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon about ancestral hauntings. Then, Country People is about two academics who move from the Bay Area to a small town in Vermont. Author Daniel Mason spoke with Here & Now’s Robin Young about procrastination, Russian folktales and how we imagine rural America.

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