“I live five blocks from Ground Zero and [9/11] shook me in a lot of ways…[I]t made me reassess what I wanted to do with my career…Life is so fragile, it can be taken from us so swiftly by fanatics – how should it be spent while we have it? I thought there are stories I could tell as a novelist that go beyond mere entertainment, and those two things fed very much into the stream that led to Narrows Gate,” says Jim Fusilli.