Author Bernardine Evaristo wrote the Booker prize winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. But before she did, like way before, she was incredibly unsure of herself or how she - as someone with a Black father and white mother - fit into her mostly white town. Even still, Evaristo always knew she had something important to say. She lays out those early struggles and how she overcame them in her new memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up. Evaristo told NPR's Michel Martin that she has always been a private person but sharing so many of her secrets for the reader was very liberating.
Author Tess Hadley's new novel opens with an affair, but that's not really what the book is about. Free Love is set in the 1960s just outside of London and it starts with a wealthy woman in her 40s, Phyllis, sharing a secret kiss with a much younger man who is not her husband (gasp). The kiss has unintended consequences and Phyllis has to figure out what she really wants out of life. Hadley told NPR's Elissa Nadworny that being part of the bourgeois is not something she's familiar with, but she loves to write about it because she doesn't think that world exists anymore.
There is an Icelandic word, sprakkar, that means outstanding women - and those women are at the heart of the book Secrets Of The Sprakkar: Iceland's Extraordinary Women And How They Are Changing The World. Iceland's first lady and author, Eliza Reid, interviewed women from all walks of life to find out what makes being a woman in Iceland so great. Reid told NPR's Leila Fadel that not everyone knows Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Equality Index for the past 12 years, so she set out to change that.
If you were to ask most people what the very first invention that humans came up with is, many of them might say the wheel.
It isn’t a bad guess, but believe it not, the wheel was nowhere close to being the first invention.
In fact, as far as we know, there were a whole bunch of things that were invented before the wheel, and in fact, probably had to have been invented before the wheel.
Learn more about why the wheel wasn’t invented sooner, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Back in 2013 author Anthony Marra wrote a book that is every bit as timely today. A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena takes place in Chechnya, a place very familiar with warring with Russia, in 2004. It's a story about the people - everyday, ordinary people - war and its aftermath impacts. Marra told NPR's Jacki Lyden that he wrote "a novel about people who are trying to transcend the hardships of their circumstances by saving others."
Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is one of the smallest countries in the world. The country has only one proper hotel and that has just 9 rooms.
Once you visit the country, there is no car rental service, there isn’t an ATM machine anywhere in the country, and the entire country doesn’t take credit cards.
Oh, and good luck trying to get online.
Learn more about Tuvalu, the least visited country in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.