Rahla Xenopoulos was featured as the first guest on the new CliffCentral book show, Book Worm with Nikki Temkin. She told listeners more about her latest novel, Tribe, and opened up about the things that drive her as a writer.

Temkin summarises the premise of Xenopoulos’ novel: “We are born into tribes, and then we choose our own tribes”. She goes on to say, “We make tribes, we choose them, we are born into them, but in a way it’s the one that you’ve chosen that can really sustain you.” Tribe is a compelling story of six friends who have to navigate the connection that they have made with each other. It explores the fault lines of human connections in search of common ground. The characters are all trying to “connect with each other in a very disconnected world, because we are all ironically disconnected,” the author explains.

“A lot of the characters are borrowed from people around me, from friends and relatives and little aspects of people I know,” Xenopoulos says, explaining that Tribe is in no way biographical. She shares more about the small biographical elements which are inevitably present in the novel, and chats about her first book which was pure biography – A Memoir of Love and Madness.

Xenopoulos also reveals how it came to be that Red Hot Chilli Peppers drummer Chad Smith wrote the shout on the cover of her book ,“The Less Than Zero of 2015”. Listen to the podcast to hear the original quote and find out why it was deemed slightly inappropriate (despite the fact that it was extremely positive):

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Book details

• Tribe by Rahla Xenopoulos
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  EAN: 9781415203965
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