Hello everybody. Welcome to The Other People podcast, a weekly program featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles. Thank you for listening.

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So my guest today is Regina Porter, author of a new novel called The Rich People Have Gone Away.

All of it emerges through character.

I do not ever write toward a theme.

I write toward getting to know the character.

The more you know the character, the more specific the world of the

character, the more organically the themes will come out and by large the more universal, I think

those themes will be. Okay, that was Regina Porter. Her new novel is called The Rich People

Have Gone Away. It is available now from

Hogarth. The rich people have gone away is set in 2020 in the heart of the pandemic, the beginning

of the pandemic. This is a riveting polyphonic novel about the lives of ordinary New Yorkers living in an extraordinary time.

It is also a crime story, a missing person story.

And it brings into focus this novel does, the pressures that were brought to bear by the pandemic,

pressures that to some extent remain with us.

It exposed some fault lines.

Let's put it that way, both in personal relationships and also at a more macro level.

This is Paige Turner and a deeply intelligent novel that does a great job of

illuminating our recent collective past. I had a great time meeting Regina Porter and talking with her

about the rich people have gone away. That conversation is coming up.

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