Goodreads asked Agate Nesaule:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Agate Nesaule In 1991 when the Soviet Union was breaking apart, Latvians and others living outside their homelands returned with huge suitcases crammed full of consumer goods unavailable under Soviet control. I shopped like a crazy person. The phrase “shopping for relatives” kept circling in my mind because soon I realized we were shopping not only for gifts to take but we were also inspecting our relatives, deciding with which ones we form a relationship and from whom we would part, in other words, we were shopping for people. I wrote a poem and a short essay about the double meaning of this phrase, but that was not enough. So I began using fictitiously my experience of returning to Latvia. I had no story and no characters, but they showed up eventually for Lost Midsummers: A Novel of Women’s Friendship in Exile.

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