Two summer mysteries unravel in 'The Cliffs' and 'The God of the Woods'

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2024

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's episode focuses on two summer reads trying to piece together some pretty big questions. First, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with J. Courtney Sullivan about The Cliffs, which follows an archivist digging through the history of a seaside Victorian house in Maine — and the generations of women who lived there — at the owner's concern that it's haunted. Then, NPR's Scott Simon asks Liz Moore about The God of the Woods, which grapples with the disappearance of a wealthy family's daughter from a summer camp in the Adirondacks in 1975.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh.
0:05.0	Sometimes you open a book because you want to be taken somewhere, anywhere, besides your hot and humid home office,
0:12.0	where the free AC you got from your neighbor can barely bring the room down to 80 degrees.
0:17.0	In a bit, we'll hear about a thriller set in the Adirondack Mountains in 1975.
0:22.6	But first, Jay Courtney Sullivan's new novel, The Cliffs, takes place in a mansion along a shoreline.
0:28.5	And it's about an archivist that does some digging into the house and finds all these stories of
0:33.9	women throughout the years connected to the mansion and the land it's on.
0:42.9	It's a bit overplayed to say that the setting is the main character of a story, but in this interview with Emperor's Mary Louise Kelly, the two of them talk about how much the time and
0:47.8	place of a woman's birth determines her future.
0:51.5	That's ahead.
0:52.8	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:57.6	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
1:02.1	On our new show, Sources and Methods.
1:04.2	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people
1:07.5	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:11.8	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:16.7	The central character of J. Courtney Sullivan's new book, The Cliffs, is a house, an old Victorian house, which sits high above the sea in Maine.
1:26.9	But like so much of Sullivan's work,
1:29.7	the heart of this multi-generational story is women, and how often their stories are discarded or
1:36.9	lost. If the central character of the cliffs is a house, the protagonist is Harvard archivist
1:43.5	Jane Flanagan. Jane returns to her hometown,
1:47.2	site of the house in question, after an episode at a work party that has led to her being put on leave
	...

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