Set in the Florida Keys in the summer of 1935, Summertime shines a spotlight on a group of former American soldiers who fought in the first world war; traumatised men now living in an overcrowded camp on the archipelago.

“My individual characters are fictional,” Vanessa Lafaye explains, “but most of what’s depicted in the book actually happened.” The racial segregation she depicts among the inhabitants of the Keys was only too real; so too was the way these desperate, damaged veterans were abandoned by their government to perish in the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, one of the most powerful to strike North America.

Even though Lafaye grew up in Florida, she’d never heard about the tragedy until she stumbled across the facts while researching something else entirely.

She drew on memories of her Florida childhood to bring to life the “sensual aspects of the climate and ocean”, but found that having lived in the UK for nearly 30 years gave her an invaluable outsider’s perspective.

More pertinently, British novels introduced her to the full horror of the first world war. Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong was a “complete revelation”; it wasn’t until she read it that she realised just how much about the conflict her American education had omitted. Her interest piqued, she then sought out Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and others in the canon of first world war literature. These books “laid the foundations” for Summertime, which she wrote in a flurry of creative energy after recovering from cancer. “I felt this compulsion to get the story out,” she explains. “Not only was I scandalised by the events themselves, it was an even worse scandal that they’d been forgotten.”

Summertime is published by Orion (£12.99). Click here to order it for £10.39