WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.