There's an island just across the lagoon from Venice, Italy, called Marano. It's famous for glassmaking.

The families who've toiled in front of furnaces for generations have created everything from elaborate

chandeliers to translucent glass beads. The island in many ways is very different now than it was 500

years ago, but if you look closely, in other ways, the heart of Murano seems just the same.

From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Courtney Collins in for Chris Boyd.

Tracy Chevalier's most recent novel, Ben's Time, to followed the same family from the 1400s to modern day,

gliding across decades and centuries the way people in Marano hop a gondola back and forth to Venice.

Led by the fierce and talented Ursula, members of the Rosso

families survive plagues, experience loss, and learn new ways to preserve their beautiful work

as time marches relentlessly on. Tracy Chevalier's novel is called The Glassmaker, and she joins

us now to talk about it. Tracy, welcome to think. Thank you. It's good to be here.

So will you share the story first off about kind of how you got started down the path of this

book? Because this didn't come from you. It came from someone who was one of your fans and readers.

Yes, you know, a lot of readers make suggestions to me about what I should write about.

They come up to me after events, they email me, and their suggestions are always really interesting, but they usually are the most interesting to them.

And I often end up saying, you know, I think you should write this book about me.

And but once, years ago, I was in Milan in Italy doing an event and afterwards a man came up to me and said,

I think you should write about Venetian glass beads because they were used in trade all over the world.

And they were made by women, often at their kitchen tables over a little lamp.

And here's some books about them.

And I was very polite.

I said, thank you for the idea.

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