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Books.

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest is Howard Norman.

His new novel is What Has Left the Daughter, published by Houghton Mifflin-Harkort.

Said in Nova Scotia, its hero is a man who has lived an emotionally isolated life.

Then, in 1967, when a U-boat from World War II rises off the coast,

he realizes that nothing will remain hidden and nothing can remain repressed.

He begins to write a long letter, really a memoir,

to a daughter he hasn't seen in over 20 years.

In it, he reveals his secrets.

Howard Norman, how did this novel emerge?

Emerge is probably the operative word, Michael.

It was a story that I'd wanted to tell from before the bird artist, which was in 1994.

So there's always two answers to that.

One is how long it takes something to finally mature, finally come to

be ready to be written. But actually also, it just took a lot of research. And I researched

...