I have a younger brother. He’s eight years younger than I am, and he’s also my closest friend. An eight-year gap between siblings often makes friendship difficult, but we found our way to it, perhaps because I spent so many hours playing with him when he was young.
The years passed, and he moved to Australia many years ago, married a wonderful woman, and together they have two daughters. We remained best friends, only now the distance between us is measured in oceans.
A year ago, he turned fifty. (Quick mental math will reveal that I am currently fifty-nine 😊).
Australians, living as they do on the opposite side of the Earth, have a gift for traveling to places the rest of us rarely reach. They decided to celebrate his birthday in Thailand, and despite the distance, I decided to go. Because a fiftieth birthday, a younger brother, and a best friend are reason enough.
I had never been to Thailand before. But I also wanted to write a book on that trip. Or more precisely, to begin a book. A story set in a faraway land.
In most of my novels, I’ve written about women who struggle against war, against the uncertainty that surrounds them, against dark forces that seek to destroy them. Women defined by survival. In this book, I wanted to explore a different kind of struggle, one that has nothing to do with war.
I chose to write about Elsa: a young German woman who travels with her husband from cool, familiar Europe to Thailand, which one hundred and thirty years ago was still called Siam. There, she will wrestle with loneliness, with strangeness, with heat and suffocating humidity. And with something she did not expect to find: a forbidden romance.
Throughout my journey in Thailand, I met people who were warm, smiling, and quietly radiant. I sat on beaches overlooking turquoise-glass-colored water, under a blazing sun, in air so heavy with heat and moisture it was almost tangible, and I wrote the outline of a story about the collision of two worlds. I gave Elsa a forbidden romance with a French doctor whose eyes carry a sadness she can’t quite name. Not born of a desire to betray, but of a desperate hunger for hope and a need to believe that love is still possible.
It took me nearly a year to write this book. Now, it is ready to meet the world.
In three months, I’ll return to Thailand to see my brother, his wife, and their daughters again. And I’ll bring them a copy of the book.
I don’t know whether you’ll love it or not. What I do know is that writing this journey moved me deeply: the story of a young woman stepping into an unknown future.
