A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.

Until recently, I lived in an old house of my own. It had sloping floors, no closets, no bathroom big enough in which to take an actual bath.

Sometimes I felt awash in plastic toys, old newspapers and milk cartons I thought I was recycling. But occasionally, when there was a fire in the large kitchen hearth and I was sitting beside it at the table, I imagined the people who had gone before me: The young woman who gave birth in the room just off the kitchen that was known as the borning room; the middle-aged woman who cried at the inattentions of her husband in the room that was our bedroom; the child who died of diphtheria croup in the room that belonged to my son.

Sometimes I would have to force myself to realize that they, too, lived their lives in technicolor, that their experience of life was just as vivid and as immediate as mine. In that house there was a great deal of history -- the history of accounts rendered, dresses falling, bitter accusations and words of love. It was a house full of stories.

Last year, when I was on tour for the paperback of Fortune's Rocks, I was giving a reading at a bookstore in Nashville. A woman in the audience raised her hand and asked: Why did you set both novels in the same house? And I answered that I had been thinking about the fact that a house with any kind of age might have dozens of stories to tell.

Ten or eleven women, each with her own life, her own story, could be imagined to have lived in the house that featured in The Pilot's Wife and Fortune's Rocks. For example, I said, you could write, say, a story about a women who lived there during World War II, or during The Great Depression.

If I didn't actually pause in my answer, I had a heart-stopping pause in my head. There's an idea, I thought. Same house, absolutely derelict this time, very different kind of woman trying to make a go of it during a difficult era in our nation's history.

I have no memory of the rest of the Q and A, or the signing, but I do remember moving immediately to the history section of the bookstore and searching for a book on the Great Depression.

My escort found me and said, "You know, they want to give you a book for doing the reading." "Wonderful," I said. "I want this one." She glanced down at the book and narrowed her eyes at what looked to be a very dry history text. "Are you sure?" she asked. "I'm very sure," I said.

The novel that resulted is Sea Glass. I often think that sea glass itself is not unlike old houses in that it, too, suggests stories of previous lives.

Sea glass is essentially trash -- bits of glass from ships that have gone down or garbage that has been tossed overboard. The glass breaks and then is weathered by the sea and washes up onto shore. The shards take on a lovely patina and come in many subdued colors. Sea glass will not break.

I have spent many hours on the beach collecting sea glass, and I almost always wonder, as I bend to pick up chunk of bottle green or a shard of meringue white, what the history of the glass was. Who used it? Was it a medicine bottle? A bit of a ship's lantern? Is that bubbled piece of glass with the charred bits inside it from a fire?

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist. I don't know that I will write any more novels set in that particular house on Fortune's Rocks beach, because I have to wait for that collision of ideas.

But I suspect the house has many stories left to tell. I know that dwelling very well now. I feel an odd sort of bond with it, a unique kind of loyalty.

I hope you enjoy Sea Glass.