Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. In Lisa Smith's debut novel, Jamaica

Road, there's a character who was originally just supposed to pop in, be a jerk, and then

exit the narrative forever. But the thing about writing fiction is that the characters also

have a say in what they do. And so this one in particular happened to stick

around. Author Lisa Smith spoke to here and now as Deborah Becker about this process of

discovering things about the people she's writing about and learning to stop resisting what they're

telling her. That's ahead. 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.

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

A coming-of-age novel and a love story set among the racial tensions in London in the 1980s.

All of this and more is in Lisa Smith's debut novel, Jamaica Road. The book centers on Daphne,

who is 12 years old when we meet her and her best friend Connie, and we follow them for a tumultuous 12 years as they wrestle with identity, love, as well as hate, and some historical events in Britain

that resonate today. Again, the book is

Jamaica Road and Lisa Smith joins me now to talk about it. Welcome. Hello, thank you for having

me on. Well, let's talk about your debut novel. Daphne, our center character here, is born in London

to a Jamaican family. And I wondered, is this partly your story, too?

Well, like most writers, you kind of start from what you know. During a creative writing workshop,

of all things, the course coordinator asked the class to think of an outsider. And this image of a boy that had arrived at my primary school,

...