She doesn't know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be.

Time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised.

I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.

After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.