Bow (as in the ribbon) -- jail -- yen.

To see the full interview, click here.

Novelists talk with an agonizing amount of hubris about how they found their voice. The reality, however, is that I did indeed find mine in Vermont. Vermont is a fascinating microcosm for issues that have relevance everywhere-the environment vs. development, alternative vs. traditional medicine, all the baggage that we bring to gender and sexual orientation-and it is so small that it is possible to bring these issues to life on a scale that is human, recognizable and profoundly accessible. For instance, I would never have written a book about the literal and metaphoric place of birth in our culture (Midwives), if I had remained in Manhattan. After all, home birth isn't a part of the dialogue. Nor would have I written a vaguely eco-novel such as Water Witches-and it's interesting to note that I wrote that novel in 1993 (it was published in 1995), years before we were focused on global climate change the way we are now. It's not that I am especially prescient -but in some ways Vermont is.

Even a novel such as The Double Bind, which explores themes that I would have been likely to come across in New York-including, of course, mental illness and homelessness-was informed by Vermont. It was easy to research the subject at the state psychiatric hospital and one of the correctional facilities, as well find therapists and social workers who were available to help me, because we are just so small. A phone call here and a phone call there, and I was able to line up the necessary interviews.

Now, I love New York. I get back there often, and half of Before You Know Kindness is set there. But I believe I have found subjects in Vermont that are more in keeping with my strengths as a stylist.

Back in 1999, the father of a girl in my daughter's kindergarten class asked me if I would read an unpublished diary his grandmother had left behind. His mother had just translated it from German into English and typed it up. We're good friends, and so I was happy to take a look at it.

The diary chronicled this woman's life on a massive estate and farm in East Prussia, and there was a lot in it that fascinated me-especially the desperate journey the women made in the last months of the Second World War to reach the British and American liners ahead of the Soviet army. I shared it with some editors, but there weren't any takers.

Years later, in 2005, I read Max Hastings' Armageddon, his non-fiction account of the last year of the Second World War in Germany, and I kept coming across references to scenes that were familiar. And then I realized why: I had read of similar occurrences in that diary six years earlier. I asked my friend if I could see it again. When I reread it, I decided I wanted to write a novel set in the period, and thus began some of the most intense research (and writing) of my professional career.

Skeletons at the Feast is a love story-a love triangle, really, set in Poland and Germany in the last six months of World War Two.

The characters? There is 18-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats who were originally pleased when their massive estate once more became a part of Germany in 1939, but who discovered over the next five years what Nazi management really meant for their rural district.

There is her lover, Callum Finella, a 20-year-old prisoner-of-war who was brought from the stalag to her family's farm as forced labor. And there is a 26-year-old Wehrmacht corporal who the pair know as Manfred-but who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a German Jew who managed a daring escape from a train bound for Auschwitz, and who has been sabotaging the Nazi war effort ever since.

The novel chronicles the longest journey of their lives: Their attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines.

In the last decade, I have written novels or scenes within novels from the perspectives of (among others) a midwife, a transsexual lesbian, a vigorous female senior citizen, an African-American foster child, a 10-year-old girl, an 18-year-old female Prussian aristocrat in 1945, a young Jewish man from Germany who has jumped off a train on the way to a death camp in 1943, and a variety of balding middle-aged men. I actually found this last category-the balding middle-aged men who are like me-the least interesting.

We also moved a lot, however, and in one period I went to four different schools in four years. And so while my childhood wasn't bad, it didn't revolve around great friends once I finished 6th grade. The fact is, my friends changed by necessity almost every year from 7th grade on.

My favorite memories, in no apparent order, are:

Playing Little League baseball in Stamford, Conn.;

Reading Johnny Tremain and To Kill a Mockingbird and April Morning for the first time;

Visiting my grandparents in Tuckahoe, N.Y., and listening to Leo Bohjalian-my grandfather-play the oud, after losing to his wife in pool. I can still smell my grandmother's beregs;

Organizing baseball cards in my living room before thunderstorms;

Flying anywhere on airplanes;

Being scared silly by the following movies: "The Birds," "The Haunting" and "Psycho."

The Double Bind may be as good an example as any. The novel had its origins in December 2003, when Rita Markley, the executive director of Burlington's homeless shelter, shared with me a box of old photographs. The black-and-white images had been taken by a once-homeless photographer who had died in the apartment building her organization had found for him. His name was Bob "Soupy" Campbell.

The photos were remarkable, both because of Campbell's evident talent and because of the subject matter. I recognized the performers-musicians, comedians, actors-and newsmakers in many of them.

I write a weekly column for the "Burlington Free Press," which was why Rita wanted me to see the photos. She thought they might make for an interesting story, and she was absolutely right: I wrote about Campbell in December 2003, researching his life and accomplishments and why he might have wound up homeless, and to this day it remains one of my favorite essays I've written for the paper. I had celebrated Campbell's talents (which were extensive) and I had reminded people of the very fine line that separates so many of us from being homeless. But then I thought I was done with the subject.

Six months later, in June 2004, I reread The Great Gatsby. I love that novel. Few writers crafted sentences as consistently luminescent as Fitzgerald or understood class and culture and longing as well.

Then I went for a bike ride on a dirt road deep in a canopy of woods. My wife had heard a story on the radio that day that advised parents to tell their children the following: If someone ever tried to abduct them while they were riding their bikes, they should hold onto the handlebars for dear life. It's more difficult to abduct someone and throw them into the back of a car or a van if they are firmly attached to their bike. The geometry just doesn't work.

As I rode, I started thinking about Bob Campbell for the first time in months, and I was thinking about him in regard to The Great Gatsby. Why? Perhaps it's because we always see The Great Gatsby through a haze of black and white photographs-Campbell's medium. And, of course, The Great Gatsby is a jazz age novel-and Campbell photographed a lot of jazz musicians.

And so the idea for The Double Bind formed in my head on that dirt road. I knew precisely how a book would begin and-for the only time in my life-I knew precisely how it would end.

Of course, this also meant I know A and Z, but not the 24 letters in between. That meant I had a different set of problems to solve. I wrote four drafts before I could even begin to seriously edit it: A Henry James-ian third person draft; then a first person draft narrated by Laurel Estabrook (the main character); then a draft with multiple first person narrators; and, finally, a draft that was third person subjective-less cold and omniscient than that initial version. This draft worked in ways the earlier ones hadn't. Only then was I able to start refining and tightening the novel.

When I was a sophomore in college, the writer-in-residence was a novelist whose work I cherished. She was teaching a creative writing seminar in the spring semester, and I wanted very much to be among the anointed she was going to choose to be in it. That meant submitting a short story in December, which she would read over the holiday break.

In January, I was summoned to her office in the brick monolith that housed the school's English Department, and there I met her for the first time. She was seated behind a desk the size of a putting green. When she saw me, she adjusted her shawl, fixed her eyeglasses, and said, "You're Chris. I'm not going to try to pronounce your last name."

I nodded, a little apprehensive now. Then she slid my short story across the expanse of desk as if it were a piece of profoundly disagreeable roadkill. "Well, Chris I'm-Not-Going-to-Pronounce-Your-Last-Name," she continued, "I have three words for you."  This clearly wasn't going to be good, but I am nothing if not optimistic. And so I waited.

Then it came: "Be a banker," she said. And we were through.

Someday I will dedicate a book to her.

I feel guilty limiting the list to a mere ten, given how many books that are indeed special to me. I have, however, always enjoyed that game in which you have to pick a few books or movies to have with you on a desert island, and so here's a group that I've read multiple times-the ultimate compliment, I believe, one can bestow upon a book.

Incidentally, the list has 11 titles. I couldn't possible delete any one of them. Mea culpa.

• The Voyage of the Narwahl by Andrea Barrett-A tale of icebound sailors and scientists in the 19th century (and the women they leave behind) that I found as moving as it was gripping.
  
  
• The Joyous Season by Patrick Dennis-Imagine Holden Caulfield with less angst and a better sense of humor, and you have the howlingly funny narrator of this book. The book chronicles the near-dissolution of one wealthy Manhattan family in the early 1960s, and what it takes to keep it intact. Nearly every page is a scream, especially read today, because every moment feels so fabulously retro.
  
  
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald-Individual sentences give me a whopper of an inferiority complex, but I love every one.  You'll see echoes of it in my new novel, The Double Bind. 
  
  
• The Cider House Rules by John Irving-I savor Irving's books because his characters are so gloriously eccentric and idiosyncratic, and this sweeping story is filled with people I cherished.
  
  
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer-The tale is riveting, and not simply because it's all true. Krakauer is a terrific storyteller.
  
  
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee-There is obviously so much to savor in this book and so many ways to examine it. Among the elements that I cherish the most is what an authentic father-daughter love story it is.
  
  
• Homeboy by Seth Morgan-The only novel Morgan left us before he died in a motorcycle accident. The prose (from page 1) is electric, the story is gloriously seamy, and the ending profound and poignant.
  
  
• A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher-A story about race, yes, but also a tender story of fathers and sons, and the unexpected places where we find friendship.
  
  
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje-I love novels that teach me something, and in this book I learned a bit about Africa, archeology, and Egypt in the years immediately before the Second World War. It's also a breathtakingly beautiful and authentic love story.
  
  
• Sophie's Choice by William Styron-Perhaps the most sad and wrenching novel I've ever read.
  
  
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe-Wolfe is characteristically bemused in this history of the Mercury space program, but he also captures the sense of adventure and courage that peppered the endeavor, as well as the humanity of the test pilots, the astronauts, and their wives.