This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The author Jennifer Egan is out with a new book this month, and it's called The Candy House.

It's a kind of follow-up to her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad,

and that book from 2010 won a Pulitzer Prize. Now, Candy House revisits some of the same characters,

and it's definitely one of the most anticipated novels of the year. Goon Squad was largely about the

music business, and that's not a surprise,

because Egan herself is a tremendous music fan, and her ideas about structure and form

often owe something to the albums that shaped her as a young listener.

You know, I came of age in the great era of concept albums, and they were so literary.

First of all, there were pages, there was paper.

My friends and I poured over the lyrics and the images.

And the very nature of a concept album is that it tells one big story in small pieces that sound very different from each other and that sort of collide.

I invited Jennifer Regan to tell us about three concept albums that may have influenced her over time.

And she started in 1973 with the Who's Quadrophenia, which tells the story of a

disaffected working-class kid in the 1960s.

I think Quadrafinia is really one of the greats because it tells an enormous story. It has such an epic, the music itself has such a lush, epic quality.

And I think for me also, you know, part of it was that I fell madly and led with Roger Daltry.

And so I felt that somehow England and the sort of

rock and roll version of England really held my future.

You know, I grew up in San Francisco. I had never left the country. And for me, this idea of

getting to England and somehow merging with the world that

seemed to exist there, which did include Roger Daltry in some way, kind of, you know, tingled as a

...