Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is bookworm.

Today it's my pleasure and honor to have as my guest, Dame Antonia Bayett.

She is the author most recently of a whistling woman, but it's a peculiar circumstance.

It's a kind of completion to a quartet of books that investigates the nature in a sense of

completeness.

The books began with the Virgin in the Garden, followed by Still Life, by Babel Tower,

and now a Whistling Woman, published by Knopf, is the final book in the series.

Now, for me, as I was rereading all the books, the books are haunted by the death of a child, which comes in its most intense version in this book where so many of the children we now see are bearing the consequences of witnessing almost supernatural cruelties.

And people haven't really spoken about this because there's so much cognitive

and metaphorical subject matter in the book.

And yet the pain of a child seems to run through all the books,

whether it's Marcus' breakdown in the first book or the terrible witnessing two or three times

over in the course of the book of a parent who kills the family.

And I wondered about that

because it seems like the wound

that generates some of this thought.

Some of this is personal

...