Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There's a lot going on in Blitzbuzz-Wule's new book, The Scent of Burnt Flowers.

If you don't know, he's a multi-hyphenate, a rapper, filmmaker, and now author. In his debut novel,

there's a couple on the run, a dicey love triangle, some magical realism, and it takes place in Ghana,

in the late 60s as the country was fracturing and falling apart. That last thing wasn't an accident.

Ghana's first president, Kwame and Kuruma, a socialist, was overthrown in a coup backed in part

by the CIA. Bazauli makes this great point in this interview with NPR's Michelle Martin

about how Ghana's story up until then inspired other countries to what he calls

reach for independence, only to be undermined.

And as the main thrust of the plot proceeds, you know, the couple on the run, the Love

Triangle, all that stuff, what we're really reading about here is the power of global forces. In the U.S., national security news can feel

far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new

show, sources and methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of

real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and

methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally today, when we last

checked in with Samuel Bazahoule, better known as Blitz,

he had just directed his debut feature at the Burial of Kojo, which was based entirely in Ghana,

with an almost entirely local cast and crew, and was the first original film from Ghana to be released on Netflix.

That was in 2019.

Since then, he's co-directed Beyonce's visual album, Black is King, directed the upcoming

film musical version of The Color Purple, and somehow, in the middle of all of that,

he just published his first novel.

It's called The Scent of Burnt Flowers, and he agreed to sit still long enough to tell us

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