In the late winter of 2016, the partial manuscript of my novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, lay strewn across a dark road in upstate New York.

I didn’t know my first wedding would be my last, anyone’s last, until the dance floor was almost empty and I was matching my mouth up with the lipstick mark on the rim of an abandoned champagne glass.

My novel The Book of Lost Light came to me initially in the form of a question: what if a man set out to photograph his son every day of his life from birth onwards? That’s all I had to go on.

After the party I felt very cool in my long, slim black dress, and through the French doors, I could feel the morning’s overcast grey. August. Six am. British Isles. The restlessness.

It’s not an original thought, but writers are spies. Our antennae are up for interesting stories, turns of phrase, strange images, emotional responses, any kind of authentic detail that we can steal or model to make our characters more real. I count a lifetime of this kind of watching and listening as the research that formed the basis of the stories in Lost Girls.

The way I see it, the Tower of Babel was probably just a ladder and an idea: I want to see the face of God.

Kingdomtide, Rye Curtis’s debut novel, opens in a Vermont nursing home where Cloris Waldrip recounts the events following a plane wreck of twenty years earlier in Montana’s Bitterroot wilderness. After watching her husband and the pilot die, Cloris spends months wandering the woods, physically and emotionally lost.

In the broadest sense, the research for my novel, The Nature of Remains, began when I was twenty-one. I’d put off my undergraduate science sequence until my final year of college because I detest exact measurements.

The little men have been missing from Yuvie’s apartment for two weeks now. She knows they used to be there, hiding under the bed, sneaking into the pantry at night.