Once I had Adam’s character in mind, an idea for a plot came to me: the search for a baby who’s been missing for ten years. I still didn’t know what had happened to that baby, but the idea felt right for a novel. Excited with the idea, I started writing the novel back in 2015, but hit a wall about four chapters in. In despair, I set the book aside, but the character of Adam Lapid stayed with me. I decided to write another novel, this one set about one year after Ten Years Gone, and hoped to return to the original idea later on. That novel became The Auschwitz Violinist, which is chronologically the third novel in the Adam Lapid series.

Following that, I went back to writing Ten Years Gone, and once more couldn’t get it off the ground. So I wrote another novel, The Dead Sister, which takes place before The Auschwitz Violinist and is also available.

Now I had two Adam Lapid novels published, and I decided to let the idea for Ten Years Gone die a natural death. But it kept on nagging me, demanding to be written. So I did.

I was back in Israel by then, and for three months I wrote Ten Years Gone, and…it was a flop. I didn’t like it. My wife didn’t like it. The novel just wasn’t good.

At that point, I was adamant. I had to let this idea go. I couldn’t waste more time on it. I had tried, and failed, to write it three times. It was time to adopt baseball rules and admit that I had struck out on this particular idea.

And I did, for a while at least. But the idea kept bugging me, and eventually I figured that I would have to write this novel, if only to get it out of my system, to clear my mind for other ideas.

So I spent another three, four months on it, writing it from scratch, adding new scenes and characters and plot twists, and discarding some dull and bland scenes and characters that I had written in the earlier version.

The result is what you’ve just read.

As I was writing it, I could feel the story take shape, and I knew that this time it was going to turn out just fine. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. There were days in which the words came slowly. There were times when I simply did not know what should happen next. But little by little, the problems were solved, the words got typed, and the story came together.

After it was done, I reread it and felt that all the hard work had paid off. The story was alive and emotional and had a good deal of action and twists. I hope you felt the same way.

I hope and plan to write more Adam Lapid novels in the future. For now, there are seven. I hope you will check out the other novels if you haven’t done so already.