In my novels I have always been interested in highly charged erotic triangles --- in What Is Left The Daughter the characters of Tilda, Wyatt, and Hans --- all living in close quarters in a small village in Nova Scotia during WWII -- are no exception.
In the natural course of things, a novelist is sometimes asked what are the autobiographical sources of a particular story or what are the historical facts that inform the story. Well, imagination itself is autobiographical ---when David Mamet was asked where he got his ideas, he replied, "I think them up." Yet while writing What Is Left The Daughter, it was imagination working in concert with basic incidents and circumstances of people's lives during wartime that I discovered during my yearly travels in Nova Scotia that made for a duet between fact and fiction. I was especially interested in the reactions of people when German U-boats began their lethal attacks on passenger ferries off the coast, and how individual families were effected. In my novel, the visiting German philology student Hans Mohring, in the wrong place at the wrong time, is caught up in the bewildering and passionate grief of a village.
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