Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Like a lot of folks, I watched every

Olympics clip that came down my timeline a few weeks back when the games were on. But what really

caught my attention was the world surrounding the games, you know, the incredibly fit athletes

in a big city with co-ed dorms. It's the perfect setting for a romance novel. But British novelist Rufaro Faith Mazurro went looking for a few when working on her own sports-themed romance and couldn't find many. I was like, there must be loads of these. This is like the biggest sport event in the wild. I feel like sports romance is having a boom, and it's been having that boom in the past four years.

It's like only hockey. It's all hockey. Yeah, yeah. Let's diversify. There's so many sports. I think maybe it's just a moment that we're going to feel a shift because I'm seeing more and more sports romances and hopefully there's loads of Olympic romances because I love it. That's her talking with Waylon Wong from Planet Money's The Indicator

about her new debut novel,

Let the Games Begin.

They talk about why the Olympics make good fodder

for romance right after the break. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily

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All right, before we get into it, the International Olympic Committee is actually pretty

strict with their copyright.

Even when NPR covers the Olympics, there are all these rules as to what we can or can't

do.

Later on, in this interview, Rufaro Faith Mazurura talks about trying to write around these

rules. But first,

she explains the premise of her novel. Let the Games begin is a rom-com that follows two characters,

Olivia and Sieg, over the course of one summer that they spend in Greece for a fictional version of

the 2024 Olympics. So Zeke is a 100-meter sprinter on Team DB and he like comes into the village, super excited and

...