The primary author Mary Ann Shaffer, an American, planned to write the biography of Kathleen Scott, the wife of the English polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. While researching the subject, she travelled to Cambridge, England, but was discouraged to find that the subject's personal papers were nearly unusable. While dealing with this frustration, she decided to spend some of her planned stay in England by visiting Guernsey in the Channel Islands, which are notable for being geographically closer to continental France than to the United Kingdom. However, as soon as she arrived, the airport was shut down due to heavy fog. Shaffer, therefore, spent her visit in the airport's bookshop, reading several histories of the German occupation of the islands during World War II.[3]
It was 20 years before Shaffer began a novel dealing with Guernsey. She had abandoned her plan to write the Scott biography, and said: "All I wanted was to write a book that someone would like enough to publish."[4]
After the manuscript had been accepted for publication (2006), the book's editor requested some changes that would require substantial rewriting. However, around that time Shaffer's health began to deteriorate dramatically, leading to her eventual death on February 16, 2008. She asked the daughter of her sister Cynthia, Annie Barrows, an established author of children's literature, to finish the editing and rewriting. Barrows did so and is credited as co-author of the novel.
