Readers ask me a version of this question a lot: "Is Brett Poole based on your dad?" The short answer is no. Brett Poole is not my father. He's an Egyptologist who used to be a paleontologist, for reasons no one — including his own daughter — can get him to explain. He disappeared when Jamie was six months old. He keeps secrets the way other people keep houseplants: quietly, persistently, and with a great deal of guilt he refuses to discuss. None of that is my dad's story.

There is a moment in the Jamie Poole Diaries (Destiny of the Departed) when a character named Nassor the Jackal, clan chief of Larupus, stands in his hall and makes an accusation against his own daughter. He blames her for the death of her mother. He blames her for the weather.

There is a circle of stone on a hilltop in the Brazilian Amazon, and on the morning of the solstice, one of its stones stops casting a shadow.