What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.

If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.

I live here in Vermont, in a village of barely a thousand people halfway up the state's third highest mountain.