Lee Stringer grew up in the outport village of Little Hearts Ease, in Newfoundland's Trinity Bay, but has been living in the nearby town of Clarenville most of his adult life. Stringer is a welder who has worked on different large scale projects from the Alberta oil sands to Labrador Iron Ore sites, and like thousands of other Newfoundlanders, commuted by plane for multiple week shiftwork. The vast majority of this novel was written in the late evenings in the work camps of these giant construction sites.