Hey, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. If you are at all interested in decolonization,

which, by the way, if you're American, you probably should be for multiple reasons considering our history and all that.

There's always this question of nonviolence versus violence, you know, which is the best, most

effective way to respond to being colonized.

It's a question that's rattling around in the head of an unnamed character in today's

book, The Committed by Vietan Wyn, which is out now in paperback.

Wyn is probably best known for his debut, The Sympathizer, which got him a

Pulitzer Prize and a decent amount of book fame. The Committed is its sequel that finds its

main character in Paris, bouncing around between snooty French intellectuals and Chinese crime bosses.

And Wynne tells NPR Scott Simon that he wanted to get the full picture of a revolution.

Not just the overly earnest stuff, but also the kind of absurd and hypocritical.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our 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.

Bietan Wins' new novel The Committed is set in 1980s Paris, but it opens on a small boat on the open seas, crammed with people escaping their homeland.

Strangers to one another before we clambered aboard our arc, we were now more intimate than lovers, wallowing in our own waist, our faces green,

our skin blistered by salt and baked into the same shade by the sun. Most of us had fled our

motherland because the communists in charge had labeled us puppets, or pseudo-pacifists, or bourgeois

nationalists, or decadent reaction reactionaries or intellectuals of the false conscience

or because we were related to one of these. There was also a fortune teller, a geomancer,

...