Goodreads asked Scott Russell Sanders:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Scott Russell Sanders What I would like to write about is less of a mystery, in the who-done-it sense, than a question. I want to know what happened to the family of my maternal grandfather, Samuel Isaac Solomon. He was born in 1886, in the village of Adeh, near the western shore of Lake Urmia, in what was then Persia and is now Iran. He traced his ancestry back to the ancient Assyrians, who had ruled over most of the Middle East from roughly 900 to 600 BCE, securing and maintaining power by brutal methods typical of empires. By the time of his birth, this once-powerful people had been reduced to scattered minorities, living as Christians in predominately Muslim countries, and suffering frequent attacks motivated by religious or ethnic hostility. In the Urmia region where Samuel grew up, Assyrian settlements were frequently pillaged, livestock stolen, houses burned, and people killed. This violence may have been the chief reason that his older brother, Joseph, immigrated to the United States in 1903, and Samuel followed two years later, at age 18. They shared an apartment in Yonkers, New York. The hope was that the brothers would establish a safe new home in America, and the rest of the family—their parents and eight younger siblings—would follow. However, by the time the brothers were securely established, World War I had broken out, and they never saw or heard from their family again. What happened to those ten Solomons left behind? In October 1914, Turkish troops and Kurdish tribesmen invaded and plundered the villages of Urmia, slaughtering men, women, and children. Historians estimate that by the end of the war in 1918, 300,000 Assyrians had been killed. Were my grandfather’s family among those murdered? He died without learning the answer, and so did his daughter, my mother. That is the question I could imagine writing about.

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