Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I love hearing about wear writers, right? You know, what does the room look like? Are their desks neat or stacked with crap? What do they always make sure to have on hand, you know, and stuff like that? Because it means something. And I'd like to think that if you know it's there, you can sense a bit of it in their work, you know, like a lone bay leaf in a giant pot of stew.

Today's interview has a little of that. It's with author Jabari Assi about his latest book, Yonder, about enslaved men and women on a plantation in the South.

As they ask these big picture questions, you know, why are we here?

What is our place in the cosmos?

What's over there past the hills, the sky, and whatever else we can see?

And he tells NPR of Sasha Pfeiffer why he always keeps a certain photograph nearby

and how it helped this big philosophical novel.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.

On our new show, Sources and Methods, NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the new novel Yonder, the Stolen live in the antebellum south.

They live under the rule of their tyrannical captor, a man named Cannonball Green, who

is referred to as a thief. They work in the plantation fields of Placid Hall during the day,

and at night they think about philosophy and love and freedom. The story is told from the

perspective of multiple enslaved men and women. There's William, his love, Margaret, Xander, who is trying to teach himself to fly, and ransom a preacher. Yonder is written by Jabari Assim, who joins us now. Hi, welcome to the program.

My pleasure. Many novels over more than the past century have used fiction to address slavery.

So you are coming to this with an existing large body of work.

What did you want to add, particularly now, when race is such a contentious issue again,

what did you feel like you could add to that body of work?

Well, a couple of things.

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