Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | How to Listen
Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “There There” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018 — centered on a group of characters all converging on an Indigenous powwow in modern-day Oakland, Calif. His follow-up, “Wandering Stars,” is both a prequel and a sequel to that book, focusing specifically on the character Orvil Red Feather and tracing several generations of his family through the decades before and after the events of “There There.” In the Book Review, Jonathan Escoffery called it a “towering achievement.”
This week, Orange visits the podcast to discuss “Wandering Stars” with Gilbert Cruz, and explains how he decided to write a historical novel while sticking with the characters and story line from his earlier book.
“I got drawn in by this part of history because it was so specific to my tribe,” Orange says. “I don’t necessarily love reading historical fiction, but if it’s driven from the interior and it’s character driven, it’s compelling to me. So figuring out the types of humans they might have been or things they might have thought or felt, that was a way for me to try to figure out how to make them real. and that’s sometimes on a sentence level and sometimes on a, like, what are their motivations or what are they doing in their day-to-day lives? What do they want?”
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
