Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars is probably

one of the most anticipated releases this year, and it looks like it's living up to the hype, you know,

a quick scan of the reviews and you see words like powerful and lyrical and triumphant. The book is

both a prequel and a sequel of sorts to his debut novel

There There. So before we hear about his new book, we're going to take a quick trip back in time to his

first big profile on NPR back in 2018. He talked to NPR's Lin Neri, and I actually remember

working on this piece as a producer, and I remember being struck by how Orange wasn't super comfortable being book famous, but it was a bargain he was down to make in order to get attention to native stories.

That's after the break.

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Tommy Orange grew up in Oakland.

His mother is white, his father a member of the Cheyenne tribe.

He wasn't much of a reader as a kid, but after graduating from college with a degree in sound engineering, he couldn't find work.

So he got a job at a bookstore where he developed

a passion for reading. You know, I was in my 20s and also searching for meaning, and I was a

narrator, so fiction was a super novel thing for me and the novel itself was, and I just fell in

love with it. The leap to writing seemed like a natural progression to Orange, and with the publication of his first novel, he took another leap, from the solitary world of reading and writing to center stage at Book Expo.

They're going to introduce Tommy. He'll go up to the podium, read for a minute, take a couple questions, and then go back down there.

...