Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive

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Zibby Owens. Tova Mervis is the author of We Would Never, a novel. Tova is also the author of the

memoir, The Book of Separation, which was a New York Times book review editor's choice and excerpted in the New York Times modern love column.

She is also the author of the novel's Visible City, the Outside World, and the Ladies' Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller.

Her latest novel, We Would Never, is being published this month. Her essays have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post,

the Boston Globe magazine Real Simple, and Psychology Today, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR.

Welcome, Tova. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about we would never a novel.

Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Okay, I have to say in my entire life, I have never read a first book of a chapter that ended with me gasping. Like, I literally was like, my kids were in the room and they were like, what what? I was like, no, it's the book. It's the book. So to have a twist and a beginning even like that, it's like,

okay, settle in. Here we go. Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And then,

of course, the rest of the book was fantastic in these characters. Oh, my gosh. I feel like I would

recognize them walking down the street. Tell listeners what we would never is about, please.

Sure. We would never is about a close-knit family in Florida who might or might not have done

something unimaginable in the wake of their daughter's divorce.

And I guess it's a mystery about a murder.

But I think really it's a mystery about family love and loyalty and about like very hard to solve questions of anger and escalation

and forgiveness. And I know that you wrote a memoir, which now I have to go back and read,

and I'm very excited to do so about how you grew up in in the Orthodox faith and you

ended up getting divorced and they're the main character in this book

...