Goodreads asked M. Allen Cunningham:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

M. Allen Cunningham PERPETUA'S KIN, my new novel, initially emerged from pieces of my own genealogy -- old family letters and other written scraps from the nineteenth century, as well as family rumors going back to the Civil War and earlier. There were so many evocative tidbits that I couldn't help but tease out an imagined cast of characters, an imagined story that I felt could touch on a few inherently American questions and problems: geography and family, memory and Manifest Destiny, optimism and war, technology and human communication, and so on.

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