Hey, it's NPR's book at the day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Today, we wanted to bring you two books,

one from a debut novelist, the other from a seasoned pro, that sort of toy with the same premise,

but end up in wildly different places. Soon, we'll hear from award-winning author Edwidge Dantica,

she's the season pro, by the way,

talking about her 2013 book, Claire of the Sea Light, which starts with the disappearance of a young girl.

But first, author Violet Cooper Smith just put out her first novel. It's called Build Your House

Around My Body, and it also starts with a disappearance, but is, at its core, a ghost story.

And Cooper Smith tells NPR's Ari Shapiro that writing the book felt like she was performing an exorcism

on herself. Build Your House Around My Body is a ghost story, a sprawling novel that spans

generations. It has some set pieces familiar

from Hollywood horror movies and Brothers Grimm fairy tales like an exorcism and a haunted forest,

but because this book is set in Vietnam, the forest is an overgrown rubber tree plantation.

The exorcism doesn't have crucifixes or holy water. The story begins with the

disappearance of a young woman named Winnie, and then it works its way backwards through time.

Winnie has a lot in common with the author Violet Cooper Smith. They're both Vietnamese American

women of mixed racial background who moved to Vietnam in their early 20s.

I really didn't intend to have a character so close to me play the biggest role in the book.

Winnie's part was originally supposed to be much smaller, but she kept growing, I think, to anchor the story, as the story itself kept getting

more and more complex.

This is your first novel, and before this, you wrote a collection of short stories that was

also populated by ghosts, as this book is.

As a writer, what appeals to you about the supernatural? Well, when I wrote the Franjipani Hotel, the short story collection, I was

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