Goodreads asked Kathleen Hegedus:

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

Kathleen Hegedus Clouds Over Markota was a manuscript left unfinished by my father when he passed away. It's semi-biographical in that it contains significant elements of his life. He was one of the 250,000 Hungarians who escaped life behind the Iron Curtain in 1956. When I travelled to Markota - 51 years later - I was surprised by how many people still remembered him and joyfully shared their stories with me. These stories are the basis for the antics of Lajos and Sanyi (the two little boy characters) in the novel. My time there gave me an understanding of life in Hungary during the Soviet years, that enabled me to complete Clouds Over Markota, which I remember my father working on, on his manual typewriter. The characters of Endre (the pilot) and Ilonka (the farm girl) intrigued me from those left-behind typewritten pages. I felt their story needed to be written.

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