Maud Newton and Jhumpa Lahiri interrogate one's place in the world

Writer Maud Newton could not ignore her family's white supremacist history, so she decided to reconcile with it in her new book Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation . She told NPR's Ari Shapiro that she felt a responsibility to deal with her family's past. Next, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's book Whereabouts is about a sense of place – even though we are never told where exactly the book takes place. Lahiri told NPR's Mary Louis Kelly that we can be too fixated on who we are and where we are from, so not naming where this novel is set was freeing. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy