Goodreads asked Joanne Dobson:

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

Joanne Dobson It was 1985 when this book first popped into my mind, and I was reading a National Geographic article about, of all things, narrow-gauge 19th-century Indian railroads! Suddenly into my mind popped a scene in which a frightened American missionary's wife was on a train in1857, fleeing her abusive husband, when the train ran smack into the middle of the Great Indian Rebellion. I wrote it down in cursive, then typed it into my Kaypro computer and printed it out. I filed that printout away and didn't look at it again for twenty years. Then it came back to haunt me, and thus was born the beleaguered Anna Wheeler and her story, The KASHMIRI Shawl, published in 2014.

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