Almost Home is the culmination of a vision I’ve had for more than a decade. The idea arose when I was still living in Europe in the mid-1990s. I was traveling through Spain with two friends, one Polish and one American. One night as we were lying awake in our pension talking, I began mapping out a story of a young woman whose boyfriend had died mysteriously years earlier when they were students at Cambridge. Many former Cambridge students, myself included, seemed to have complex relationships with the alma mater where they had enjoyed such deeply passionate experiences, and the death I envisioned was on some level a metaphor for those relationships. I didn’t know then that the young woman’s name was Jordan, or that she would turn out to be a diplomat, like myself at the time.

A few years later, when I returned to the States and started seriously writing novels, I was working on two ideas: one for Almost Home, which was modern, and one for The Kommandant’s Girl, which was historical. I took samples of both to my writing class and my peers liked both, but were slightly more enthusiastic about The Kommandant’s Girl, so I pursued that project and ultimately published it and the sequel, The Diplomat’s Wife

Meanwhile, the idea for Almost Home was never far from my thoughts, and I was so glad to have the chance to finally return to it and learn the many secrets and surprises the story would ultimately reveal.

The title of a talk I went to recently at Columbia University was slightly titillating. It was called “The Secret Life of War Reporters” and was inspired by Donald Marguiles’ current hit play Time Stands Still. The panel included two very distinguished war correspondents, one photographer and one writer. Both of them—like myself—no longer cover conflicts, but they talked openly and frankly about the strange world of war reporting that had defined their careers and much of their lives.

They covered the usual ground familiar to most people from countless films and books about war reporting. There was the agonising over the ethical dilemmas of essentially being a tourist in someone else’s tragedy. There was a discussion of the high physical and mental price that brave journalists pay in order to bring light to otherwise awful events. There was talk of courage and doing good in the world. It was all true and admirable. But a “secret”? Not really.

Yet there is a dirty secret in the life of many war reporters. It was certainly present in my own experiences as a reporter in Africa and while embedded with the British army in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. It is also something I explore in The Secret Keeper, which was inspired by my experiences covering the end of the civil war in the West African country of Sierra Leone. That secret is that in many ways war reporting is tremendously good fun.