The pitch was as simple as, I know this family, they lost a child, mysterious circumstances. After he died, they found out he was posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. They learned that he had been, unbeknownst to them, leading this secret double life in which he had an alter ego, which they had been totally unaware of. and he'd been moving around London pretending at 18, 19 years old that he was the son of a Russian oligarch, that his father was a Russian billionaire. Matthew Breler, because he's a particular kind of person, he's very analytical, he started recording everything on his iPhone. So they had this archive of all these conversations they had in the days and weeks after Zach went missing and was ultimately declared dead. And that allowed me to write the book in this very intimate kind of close third person fashion where you're really right there with them.

Zach Breler had two grandfathers who had survived the Holocaust, and they both fled Europe and ended up in England as teenagers. You have this moment with these two young guys in the 1940s when they arrive in London and they have to reinvent themselves. And I started to think about Zach's transformation into Zakius, billionaire son of a Russian oligarch, and the notion of self-reinvention in general. I thought that there might be an opportunity to tell a story about how London has changed. Part of the story is that the Russians come right in the '90s, but before the Russians it was the Americans. Margaret Thatcher deregulates the banking sector and there's this flood of American bankers. Zach Breler grows up obsessed with American movies, American movies about hustlers. This is a story in which almost everyone is in a kind of fake it till you make it mode. One of Zach's favorite movies was The Wolf of Wall Street. For him it was a sort of aspirational thing. The line between fantasy and reality was a little fuzzy for him and I think he got kind of drunk on that aspirational culture.

The truth about parenthood is that it abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger. Michelle and Matthew had to take a journey, learning not just about the death of their child, but that so much about what they believe they knew about Zach was just completely false. The nature of adolescence is that you need to kind of break away from your parents to some degree. They suddenly become someone you don't necessarily recognize. The challenge for the Brelers was: what do you do? Do you try and sort of smother him with control and protect him from all the stuff that's out there or is there a danger if you do that that you'll drive him away? Part of what has fueled their relentless investigation is a feeling of, oh god, what could we have done? They're sort of playing back the tape and trying to find exit ramps that they missed.

I start more than I finish. I have a novel that I reread periodically, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. There's a strange thing that's started to happen to me as I near 50, which is that when I revisit certain works of culture, I find that I relate to different characters than I did before. My favorite book that no one else has heard of is the screenplay for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but also included a diary that Soderberg kept. I decided I'm going to listen to an audio book while I do this tip-ins for the new book. It's Middlemarch, which I'd never read. Books that I find myself returning to: In Cold Blood, Robert Caro's The Power Broker, The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Anytime I go out and look for a story, I almost never find them. Usually they find me.