Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. There's something beautiful about living in an

apartment building where the folks upstairs, downstairs, down the hall, whatever, they're all a part of

your life. Yes, this can be very annoying depending on your tolerance for sound, smells, and small talk, but it's a

microcosm of life of society. The novel 33 Plaza Brugman is set in an apartment building

in Brussels in 1939. If you know the slightest bit about history, you know what's going on.

And in this interview with NPR Scott Simon,

author Alice Austin talks about how the bonds of society aren't tested by the people in power.

They're tested by the normies, the regular, everyday people who live near each other in apartment buildings. That's ahead. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe.

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podcasts. A new novel, 33 plus Brugman, opens with a list of the residents of a Brussels apartment

building. There are the Sauvans, a widower and his daughter, an apartment 4L, and across the hall of the Raphael family,

but they've disappeared in the middle of the night.

It's 1939.

Germany's invasion of Belgium is on the horizon,

and that list is signed as though ready to be handed over to authorities.

The fates of the building's residents wind together in this first

novel from Alice Austin, who joins us from the studios of WUWM in Milwaukee. Thanks so much for

...