Why the solstice

The longest night is the only night a sailor cannot outrun. That is the whole book in one sentence, and it took me four years to find it.

I started with a different idea entirely — a straight family history, dates and names and the odd photograph. It was dutiful and it was dead on the page. Nobody, including me, wanted to read it.

What changed was the calendar. Once I noticed that the gap in the logbook fell on the solstice, the whole thing reorganised itself around that one night. A debt that comes due when the dark is longest. Everything else followed.