For those of you interested in learning more about the people who inspired this novel and the early aviation scene in general, I have a long list of books to recommend. Earhart herself—as Her Last Flight suggests—wrote several accounts of her famous flights, some of which are still available. The classic of the aviation memoir subgenre, though, is Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis, which appeared in 1951 and won the Pulitzer Prize. This is the kind of book you read with one hand while you’re stirring the pasta sauce with the other: a lyrical, philosophical action-adventure that holds you in profound suspense even though you know how it ends. Not only did I come to understand the technical and human challenges of extreme long-distance flying, I felt as if I’d stepped inside the mind of an aviator.

For more on the derring-do mentality of pioneering pilots—and sheer exhilaration—you can’t beat Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. Winston Groom’s The Aviators combines the biographies of Lindbergh, Jimmy Doolittle, and the indestructible Eddie Rickenbacker in lucid, breathtaking layers. I relied heavily on Jason Ryan’s marvelous Race to Hawaii for background and details on the 1927 Dole Air Derby. More fascinating stories and characters emerged from The Lost Pilots, by Corey Mead; Sky Girls, by Gene Nora Jessen; and The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings, by Jay Spenser.

Returning to Earhart herself, two biographies in particular stand out: the extensive and illuminating East to the Dawn, by Susan Butler, and Doris L. Rich’s Amelia Earhart: A Biography. I was especially absorbed by Earhart’s childhood and her brilliant, alcoholic father, who never lived up to his promise; and her relationship with her business manager (and later husband), the publishing scion George Palmer Putnam. Earhart’s fans will certainly see shades of Putnam in my fictional George Morrow—created with a wink to my own publisher, William Morrow—but I’m afraid my imagination took over from there. (After Earhart was declared dead in 1939, G.P. Putnam married twice more and died eleven years later in Death Valley, California.)

Beyond all the research, though, I have a host of people to thank for bringing this book into the world, the bookstore, and your hands. Ten years ago, as a mother of four young children with an oversized manuscript called Overseas, I met my literary agent, Alexandra Machinist of ICM Partners, and her enthusiasm, persistence, crack negotiating skills, and (most of all) friendship have kept the books coming and the children fed, clothed, and housed for a decade now. I am so grateful to her for seeing us safely through every storm, especially now that those little kids are somehow starting college.