Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

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

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

Today, I'm very pleased.

My guest is Susanna Moore, and I had never read her before.

Now, all of you out there who like to say, oh, he's read everything, please understand that that's not remotely true.

I had never read Susanna Moore, and I've read her new novel, The Life of Objects, and just one of her previous novels in the cot.

And I want to report that she's remarkable. You don't know

what these books are going to do or how they're going to get to what they have at heart to say

to us. And they're so surprising. This novel, The Life of Objects, takes place just before and during the Second World War.

It spans seven years, and it's narrated by someone who really doesn't use her own name most of the time.

She has suddenly become a lace maker, but she does not have that in her family. The things that seem to be true about her are not. She is born in Ireland,

and she's going to disappear from Ireland, never really

to return and enter the Second World War. The novel begins as if it's a coming of age novel,

except that there's nowhere to come of age. And so we find ourselves falling suddenly from the air of the traditional novel

into a free-floating state of mystery, anxiety, and deception that is so arresting that I read this book in two days.

I couldn't stop reading it, and I couldn't imagine what it was going to do to me next.

Now, tell me, what do you know when you begin?

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