I stepped back through my own front door earlier this week and stood there for a long moment, just breathing it in. The particular smell of my own home. The familiar weight of the quiet. The light falling through the windows in exactly the way it always has. After weeks moving through Portugal, France, Germany, and Belgium — train stations and cathedral squares, cobblestones and river crossings, hotels where I kept reaching for the light switch in the wrong place — there was something almost overwhelming about stepping back into a space that simply knows me.
I’ve been thinking about that feeling of coming home ever since.
Why Coming Home Feels Like More Than Just Arriving
There’s a reason “home” is one of the oldest words in any language. The comfort of coming home isn’t only physical — it’s something deeper, more primal. It’s the recognition of self. When you’re away long enough, you begin to feel slightly untethered, as though the version of you that exists at home is waiting patiently, wondering when you’ll return to pick up where you left off.
I felt it acutely on this trip. Portugal has a particular quality — a golden light, a wistful beauty, a relationship with its own past that is unlike anywhere else I’ve been. France speaks for itself, endlessly. Germany carries its history visibly, honestly, with a weight you feel even in the most ordinary moments. Belgium surprised me, as it always does — a country that has been at the crossroads of Europe for centuries, shaped and reshaped by forces larger than itself.
All of it was extraordinary. And still, the moment my own door closed behind me, something inside me settled.
What the Continent Revealed About England
Here’s what I didn’t expect from this trip: it clarified England for me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.
I’ve been deep in the world of my new book, Death at Brookhaven — a story set in England in 1960, in a world of country houses and village life and the particular social atmosphere of the postwar years. I know that world well, or I thought I did. But there’s something about moving through the Continent — through Lisbon and Paris and the Rhine Valley, through Brussels and Bruges — that sharpened my sense of what makes England distinctly itself.
The insularity of it. The way the English relationship with the Continent has always been complicated — curious and a little wary, drawn to Europe and simultaneously certain that England is something entirely apart. In 1960, that feeling was still very much alive. The war had ended fifteen years before, but memory was long and the Channel felt, to many people, like more than just water.
Walking through places where history had moved so visibly across borders, I understood something new about the characters I’ve been writing — the way they carry their sense of home with them, what they believe it means to be safe, what they imagine lies beyond the edges of the world they know.
The Tension That Makes a Story
Home only feels like home in contrast to somewhere else. We know what belonging feels like because we’ve experienced displacement — even the gentle, willing displacement of travel.
This is true for characters, too. The ones I find most compelling are the ones who understand what they stand to lose. Who carry their sense of home so close to the surface that even a small threat feels enormous. England in 1960 was a country of deep domestic certainties, at least on the surface — and Death at Brookhaven lives in the space where those certainties begin to crack.
I can’t say more than that. But I will say that coming home with this manuscript, after weeks of moving through a Europe still carrying the visible marks of the twentieth century, I understood the story I’m telling with a new kind of clarity.
The Stories That Wait for Us
One of the things I love most about history is that it is, at its heart, a collection of homecomings. People setting out and returning. People building places that matter to them and to the generations who come after. People leaving behind stories — in the objects they kept, the letters they wrote, the houses they built — that are still there, waiting to be found.
I find those stories everywhere I travel. In a Portuguese tile depicting a scene from centuries past. In a French village square unchanged since the war. In the face of a building in Bruges that has witnessed more than it will ever say.
Every time I come home, I carry those stories with me and do my best to honor them on the page.
If you’ve ever come home from a trip and felt that odd combination of relief and wistfulness — grateful to be back, still trailing something of the world you just left — I think you understand something essential about why stories matter. We are always carrying the places we’ve been. The best fiction lets us inhabit those places, and that feeling of return, again and again.
Death at Brookhaven is coming, and I don’t want you to miss a thing. If you’d like to be the first to hear about the release — along with the research, the history, and the stories behind the story — I’d love for you to join the Reader’s Circle.
It’s the best place to follow along as this book finds its way into the world.
With love for the past,
Nancy