I didn’t want this book to end, and in a certain way it didn’t. Do you plan to write a sequel?

I don’t plan on it. I never want to write the same book twice. What keeps me awake at the wheel, as a writer, is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book — new ideas, new settings, craft challenges I’ve never handled before. What makes my heart race is to dream up something no writer has ever done before, and then give it a go. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall. I love the feeling that I’m becoming a new kind of writer, by stretching myself with every book.

Nevertheless, I am deeply flattered when readers take a book so thoroughly to heart that they crave to spend more time with the characters. I hear this plea more often about Prodigal Summer than any other book, probably because the book is about biological cycles and rhythms, and therefore — as you point out — does not entirely conform to the conventional “beginning-to-end” structure. My response is that those characters and that setting are yours now. You can imagine them doing anything you want.