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It was very liberating, living in a foreign country, a place where everything was new and strange - the food, the customs, the climate, everything.

It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.

Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.

It was the era of Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson; they all had a certain look.

The valley we lived in could easily be the setting for a fantasy novel or a prairie western novel. It could be anything.

Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest.

The Aztecs believe they started up in what's now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That's a weird legend.

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.