Mpr News With Kerri Miller

David Wright Faladé didn’t learn the truth about his lineage until he was 16. That’s when his mother told him that his biological father was a West African student she initially met in post-war Paris, as she grappled with the trauma of her Jewish family surviving the Holocaust. It was a shock to a mixed-race boy growing up in the panhandle of Texas, playing football and drinking Slurpee’s in 1970s America. But the surprises didn’t stop there. When Wright Faladé eventually moved to France and met his father, he discovered a connection to Dahomey royalty and a past complicated by the slave trade and colonialism. From 2022 David Wright Faladé on the all-Black brigade that inspired his new historical novel This made-for-TV personal history inspired his new novel, “The New Internationals,” which details the love triangle formed by a Holocaust survivor, a Sorbonne student from colonial West Africa and a Black GI from America. This week, he joined Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold