Goodreads asked Kathleen Jowitt:

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

Kathleen Jowitt Once upon a time, I had an idea that I could explain exactly what had happened in the great Christian Union Wars of the 2000s by showing it through the experience of six fictional characters who were interested but not involved in it. From where I am now, it looks like the Schleswig-Holstein question, and I don’t think I completely understood what was going on even at the time. Which is probably just as well: a blow-by-blow account of the fracas would have made a terrible novel, and I came to understand that very quickly.

The six characters, however, took on lives of their own. One of them had a love interest who ended up taking over the whole book - and suddenly it wasn't just about who got to call themselves Christian any more; it was about being fully gay and fully Christian and releasing the apparent contradictions within that. The politics stayed, but only as a backdrop.

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