Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Sulfrablatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Linda Spalding.

Her new novel, The Purchase, has just been published by Pantheon. This is a book that I fell in

love with more and more deeply as I read. It begins with a fact that the author's brothers'

great, great, great, great, grandfather was a Quaker,

was exiled from the Quaker community, moved in 1797 to Virginia where he found himself, much to his shock, owning a slave.

And so we've got the American tug of war between the spiritual abolitionist belief

and the fact that to build a house in the wilderness,

he needs help that he can't get except from a slave.

How did you learn about him?

Well, I knew that we had this ancestor who had moved from Pennsylvania to Virginia, taking

a wagon full of children.

You know, that's the sort of story that you hear as a child.

And in fact, I heard more about the next generation because the next generation moved to Kansas, which is where I grew up.

And then I find out that this long-lost ancestor who moved from Pennsylvania to Virginia for reasons unknown to me was a Quaker.

...