Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm honored to have as my guest, Richard Flanagan, the author most recently of the

Unknown Terrorist, published by Grove Press.

He's also the author of Death of a River Guide,

The Sound of One Hand clapping, and Gould's Book of Fish. We last spoke to him when the

Death of a River Guide was published. He's said about this new book, The Unknown Terrorists,

All my books until now have been about love, land, The Unknown Terrorists.

All my books until now have been about love, land, and memory,

but now I wanted to write a book about the opposite,

about people for whom love wasn't sufficient and money was enough,

who were lost and who had no connection to history or place, yet for whom tomorrow wasn't a promise but a growing threat.

What are the methods you discovered that are useful for addressing such people?

Well, before we went to air, we were talking a little about how, about the power of story

and how, what little you learn in the course of being a novelist is that story constantly

liberates you from the own poverty of your personality,

the narrowness of your history, the thinness of your concerns and opinions and politics.

And I increasingly felt, as I think many people do, a stranger in these strange times I felt the world felt

...