Coming up, a collision of historical fiction and fantasy set in 1930s, Vienna.

Behind the Voices of NPR.

Plus our distraction of the week. I'm Mel.

I'm Dave. This is the Library of Lost Time.

You know how sometimes you want a sandwich that's just like a really great baguette, butter, and salami?

Yes.

But then other times you want an over-the-top combo of maybe a slab or fried chicken with some kind of spicy sauce and too much mayo and lots of pickles and it served on bread that might as well be cake.

Yes to both of those things.

Yeah.

You want a flavor explosion. Sure those things. Yeah. You want a

flavor explosion. Sure. Sometimes. Yeah. That's how I feel about books. Sometimes I want a straight up

murder mystery or a Victorian classic or a family saga, a story that stays in its lane. Yeah.

But then other times, I crave a book that smashes genres together, something like The Kingdoms by Natasha Pooley.

That's a love story with time travel and history and a mystery.

Or Prague Spring by Simon Maurer.

That's a literary character study hiding inside a road trip story that tilts into a spy novel.

If I could drop everything and read a book

from cover to cover today, my pick would be the new novel, The Expert of Subtle Revisions,

by Kirsten Manger Anderson. It combines pre-World War II history, literary fiction, time travel,

and a mystery, all told across two timelines,

one in 2016, California, and the other in the intellectual cafe culture of 1933, Vienna.

That's a lot of book. It is a lot of book. Here's the setup. In 2016, a young woman waits for her father's boat to arrive at the port in Half Moon Bay,

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