Hi, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Linda Holmes. It's hard to think of a corner of the book world that's more varied and more vital than Y.A. A story about high school can be anything from a romantic comedy to a murder mystery. In a few minutes, we'll get to that mystery. Nick Brooks Promise Boys. We've got a romantic comedy first.

Talia Hibbert has a really devoted following as a writer of love stories for adults. Maybe her

best-known books are a trilogy about sisters that started with 2019's Get a Life, Chloe Brown.

But she hadn't really thought about writing a romance for teenagers until a publisher reached out to suggest it to her.

Her new book has the delicious title, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute.

It's about two former best friends who drifted apart and who now in high school find themselves drawn back to each other.

Hibbert tells NPR's Andrew Limbong, the once and future host of this

very podcast, that the book wound up being so personal for her that she thanked one of the lead

characters in the acknowledgements. She also talks about being a writer who lives in the UK,

but who at first found more readers in the U.S. And of course, Andrew asks her about Megan Markle.

The new novel, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute, tells the story of two black

teenagers, Celine and Brad. They're ambitious high achievers who used to be best friends

once upon a time. But that all changed because of, well, you know, high school.

Celine embraced being a self-proclaimed weirdo, and Brad went on to be a star soccer player and

one of the most popular guys in school. Neatless to say, the two don't have the easiest

relationship, and so when they both get accepted into a prestigious survival course, they are

stuck in the woods with an ex-best friend who is, as the title suggests, both highly suspicious and unfairly cute. The book is written by New York Times bestselling author Talia Hibbert, and she joins us from Nottingham, England, to talk more about it. Talia Hibbert, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you for having me. Yeah, man, there's

a happy here. All right, so I want to start with Celine, you know, she's, like I said, she's a high-achieving student, she's ambitious, and she wants to study law. And I think, like a lot of teenagers, she's sometimes full of self-confidence and then sometimes just like racked with self-doubt, you know?

How did this character come to you?

Wow.

Well, I just really love writing. and then sometimes just like racked with self-doubt, you know? How did this character come to you?

Wow.

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