Goodreads asked Claudia Casper:

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

Claudia Casper There are at least two answers to this question. I read an article a few years ago about Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian General that headed up the UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda at the time of the genocide, being found drunk and suicidal on a park bench in Hull, Quebec. I found his response to the atrocity searingly human and his story immediately elicited empathy and a feeling of kinship. I knew I wanted to write a story in the voice of a decent man haunted by memories of an atrocity. My character in The Mercy Journals, Allen (Mercy) Quincy, is much lower ranking than Dallaire, has his world view turned more completely upside down and is more complicit in the horror. The second origin for this book lies with my family history. My father was fourteen when World War II ended. His father was a general in the German army, his parents divorced during the war and his mother ran off with a doctor, leaving my father to be cared for my his grandmother and great aunt. After the war, his mother told him that she was Jewish. I grew up conscious of having a foot in both sides of that conflict, perpetrator and victim; that had a significant effect on my psyche. In The Mercy Journals, I wanted to approach murder and genocide with the assumption that we all, as humans, have some complicity. I believe that's the only way we can hope to reduce killing in the future. The third origin, is climate change, and a desire to transmit hope to the next generation, many of whom feel great apprehension and despair.

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