I'm Linda Holmes. Welcome to NPR's Book of the Day. James McBride tackles a lot in his new novel,

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. It's a story about a neighborhood in Pots Town, Pennsylvania,

and the immigrant communities that are sharing space there in the 1930s. A couple named Moshe and Chona

own the grocery store that's in the title.

McBride tells NPR's Scott Detrow that Chona was inspired by his own grandmother and the difficult life she had.

I wanted my grandmother to have a better life, he says.

So I put her on the page and made her loved.

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

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James McBride's new novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, is a lot of things.

It's at the very beginning a bit of a who-done-it.

It's also a heist story and a love story.

But it's mostly a close look at a community

in Potsdown, Pennsylvania. At the heart of that community is a couple, Moshe and Chona,

Jewish immigrants who live in a poor neighborhood called Chicken Hill.

It was a perfect setting for where you put these people of different cultures in a place

and see what happens. And so Chicken Hill was the part of

town where blacks lived, Jews lived, white people, white people like, I don't know, Italians and Greeks

and Irish, who couldn't afford any better lived. And they all pretty much got along.

...