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 and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I am very pleased to have as my guest, AS Buyett, Antonio Bayett, whose new novel,

The Children's Book, has just been published by Knapp.

I'm thrilled by it because it's one of those books that allows you to spend time with families not your own

and to go visiting with them.

It takes place from 1895 to 1914 approximately

and is about the period just before World War I

when things are both becoming very complex and at the same time breaking down.

You get some of the perfect works of art, the importance of being earnest, for instance, during this period.

And at the same time, an intricacy is giving rise to something beyond intricacy,

something too complicated to hold together,

which is in a sense what this book is about,

and the sense that what holds a family together is perhaps disappearing during this period.

I think so. I think it was a time which on the surface appeared to be very golden and sunny.

A lot of British writing is about sort of being

out in the fields, out in the woods, children running, a kind of extraordinary happiness.

And there was a lot of hopefulness because of the socialists and the Fabian society and people

...