Some writers who inspired this book in particular are William Faulkner—the Ronnie section in the middle of the book owes a debt to the Addie Bundren section in As I Lay Dying—and Margaret Atwood, whose Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin showed me some tricks about how to move a story between past and present. Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply gave me a model for a contemporary book that straddles perfectly that line between a literary novel and a suspense novel. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children helped me with conceiving a book as a series of alternating third-person perspectives, including the ways that a writer can get mileage out of the gaps—the stuff that happens between chapters, when one character hands the story off to another. But the book that most captures what I strive to do as a novelist is William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey. I just love it so much. I realized this only in retrospect, but Wyatt certainly has some Mr. Hilditch in him.