Who knew boring could be an asset? In Lea Carpenter’s new spy novel, “Ilium,” we meet our young and restless unnamed narrator on a day when she’s urging herself to be less mundane, to take more risks. She has no idea that the spies she’ll soon be working for want her precisely because she’s inexperienced, untested and ordinary. She quickly gets pulled into a high-stakes mission against a target who has a complicated backstory when it comes to American intelligence forces. Carpenter joined spy novel enthusiast Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. They talked about how Carpe ..read more

Birds, bats, freshwater mussels and a small catfish. They all slipped away in 2023, among the 21 species declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Grief is a rational response. So are the questions novelist and conservationist Lydia Millet articulates in her new book, “We Loved It All.” A blend of memoir and ecological truth-telling, Millet’s first nonfiction work examines what the vanishing will mean for the coming generations and for our sense of self. “No one wants to tell our children how glorious it was before you were around,” she writes. Millet joins host Kerri Miller o ..read more

Big Book and Bold Ideas talks with authors from around the globe. But our favorite moments come when host Kerri Miller sits down with Minnesota writers to talk about story, craft and how calling this state home influences both. This week, we took a look back at some conversations with notable Minnesota authors, including Shannon Gibney, who just won her third Minnesota Book Award, Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang and not-ashamed-to-be-a-mystery-writer William Kent Krueger ..read more

Jamie Figueroa’s new memoir, “Mother Island” is stylistically unique. She combines prose and creative nonfiction, myth and short stories to explore her memories. But the heart of the book — her push-pull relationship with her mother and her process of uncovering a true self — is as old as time. Figueroa’s mother was taken from Puerto Rico as a young child and raised in a New York City orphanage, separated from her native language, culture and ancestry. As many immigrants before her, she learned to keep her heritage distant, as a way to assimilate into a new country. But Figueroa chafed at t ..read more

Danny Ryan doesn’t see himself as ambitious — which is surprising, seeing as he’s both stolen and made millions. But in his mind, he’s just an average guy trying to survive in a world that would rather he not. Ryan is the central character of Don Winslow’s sweeping crime trilogy that draws parallels to movies like “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas.” Readers first met Ryan as a mid-level Irish-American mobster in New England in “City on Fire,” which came out in 2022. One year later, Winslow released “City on Dreams,” which follows Ryan to Hollywood. And now, in 2024, Ryan is a Las Vegas casino m ..read more

Americans overwhelmingly support gender equality. But not as many see themselves as feminists. Elizabeth Cobbs says that’s because we don’t know our history. Her latest book, “Fearless Women,” chronicles how the fight for women’s rights began at the founding of our country, when Abigail Adams urged her husband to “remember the ladies” (and her plea was met with laughter), and continues through today. Cobbs argues that women’s rights and democracy itself are intertwined, that as rights were afforded to women, the country itself became stronger. Each chapter of “Fearless Women” tells the story ..read more

Myriam J. A. Chancy spent her childhood in Haiti and then moved with her family to Winnipeg. But those island roots shaped who she became and inspired her latest novel, “Village Weavers.” It follows a complicated female friendship that spans decades and countries. Growing up in 1940s Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi are enthralled with each other — until their families discover a secret and force them apart. As girls, they didn’t understand why. But as they grow and weave in and out of each other’s lives, the secrets and lies become a burden to great to carry. Chancy joined host Kerri Miller ..read more

When Kao Kalia Yang’s mother was a child growing up in Laos, she lived a comfortable life. Her father was a prosperous merchant. She was the only Hmong girl in the village to go to school. She felt valued. The war changed all that. Hunted by North Vietnamese soldiers, Yang’s maternal family had to flee into the jungle and live a desperate existence for years. Eventually, her mother met a boy also in hiding, and they married. She was 16. It was an extraordinary chapter in her mother’s remarkable life. Yet when Yang suggested that she record the full story, her mother doubted anyone would care ..read more

What do you see, hear and experience when you drop miles into the deepest parts of the ocean? For journalist Susan Casey, it was transformative — even emotional. Her latest book, “The Underworld,” is a homage to the abyss and the scientists who explore it. She also describes her own dives in deep-sea submersibles, through the oceanic “twilight zone,” which is rich with bioluminescent creatures, down to depths of 5,000 meters, where utter darkness still teems with life. Casey joined MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to share stories about her dives and what s ..read more

If you’ve ever struggled to remember where you set down your phone, or how you know the person you just ran into at the grocery store, you’re not alone. Everyday forgetfulness is a part of living — and of aging. But for neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, more compelling than what we remember is why we remember. “The human brain is not a memorization machine; it's a thinking machine,” he writes in his new book “Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters.” Ranganath, a leading memory researcher, joined MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold I ..read more