Afterglow

Claire Messud's grandfather's handwritten memoirs gave shape to the opening scenes of This Strange Eventful History (Norton), set in Greece in 1940. Here, more inspirations.

NOAH DAVIS

The "extraordinary painter who tragically died young" captured "what life is like—the everyday and the imaginary both, the way ordinary experiences can be simultaneously familiar and strange. This is what I'm trying to do in fiction, too, to convey reality's many layers."

"BRIGHTER DAYS"

Emeli Sande, 2022

During an unpaid leave from teaching in the spring semester of 2022, "we were still emerging from the pandemic, it was a dark time, and I had to slog to get the manuscript written in the months that I had." Messud listened to this song "when I needed some light."

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK 1975

"There's a section of my novel that's set in Australia in the 1970s, and I couldn't help but have in mind Peter Weir's cult classic," Messud says. The Victorian mystery about an Australian girls school "came out when I was a kid at an Australian girls school and we were all obsessed with it."