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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm.

And today, my guest is John Ray.

His new novel is God Send, and it's published by Farris Strauss and Giroux.

It takes as its inspiration. The story of John Walker Lind, who got known, at least in the press, as the American Taliban.

But this is a stranger, and I think even more interesting story, because it's a story of a young woman.

She's around 18, and she is interested in Islam.

Her father is a professor of Islamic studies.

He was formerly at Berkeley and ended up in a community college in Northern California.

The father has left her mother.

Her name is Aidan Grace Sawyer.

And she seems to feel that as a professor of Islam he has next to no relationship to a passionate

understanding. He takes her one day to a small mosque and is rather contemptuous of the way the prayer is conducted there.

Instead, secretly, she attends daily for a month and becomes fascinated by the Quran and by the practices she witnesses

she witnesses there. And she makes a friend who is...

He's an American kid of Pakistani descent. His family are from Pakistan, and he's also interested

in Islam, but almost in a more casual way. In some ways, he's more of a typical American

...