Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. If you heard the show on Tuesday,

you know how much music can absolutely change your life. In just a bit, we'll hear how the two

black women background singers in the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense,

influenced author Donnie Walton's acclaimed debut novel, The Final Revival of

Opel and Neve. It's a book about music and racism and how your parents mess you up, to

paraphrase that Philip Larkin poem. Which are all threads in this interview we're going to listen to

first. It's with Tiffany Yannick, author of the book Monster in the

Middle. It's a romance where the couple at the center struggles to really address some generational

baggage. As Yonique tells NPR Scott Simon, when you choose to love someone, you're not just

loving that person's wounds, but their parents and their grandparents, too. Here's the interview.

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.

Fly and Stella meet early in the pandemic lockdown. Fly Lovett is in grad school. Music theory.

Stella Jones is in teacher training.

Fly, who was born with the name Earl, comes from a family with a multiplicity of religious influences.

Stella grew up, a Catholic schoolgirl in the Caribbean.

And in Tiffany Yannick's new novel, They and All of Us, carry the strands and colors of forebears and former loves

whose paths somehow deliver us to the time and place we meet one another,

or sometimes just walk away.

Monster in the Middle is the new novel from the acclaimed author of Land of Love and Drowning.

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