Curious about what’s behind Distilling Sunlight? Explore my author notes about the historical details behind the book.
These notes do contain some plot spoilers! Otherwise, they’re as shared at the end of the book, with edits only to share the most useful links and cleaning up some formatting for the web. Posted May 2026.
Thank you for coming on this quiet journey full of drinkables with me (and with Sam and Gemma). I’ve been looking forward to spending some time with Gemma for ages.
My thanks as always to Kiya Nicoll (friend, editor, other half my brain). And special thanks to my early readers for this one, who helped me smooth out a few rough bits to make a far better brew.
If you’d like to see more of Cyrus, Gemma’s father, you can find him as a significant character in Sailor’s Jewel (set on an ocean liner in 1901, in Gemma’s Auntie Rhoe’s romance). How he and Mabyn get together can be found in The Hare and the Oak (which also includes Nora and her cousin and what’s going on with that estate). You can find more Isembard and Thesan in their romance, Eclipse, and more about Dilly, Seth, and Golshan in Casting Nasturiums, a novella in the Winter’s Charms collection.
Beer and brewing
There are a lot of great books about beer brewing, including two I leaned on particularly heavily for the time and focus of the book. Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses gives a good overview of beer’s view in the world. It also includes wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall’s A Natural History of Beer gets more into the details of beer and changes in preferences over time.
Two books, however, were even more specific. Peace! Beer from the 1920s and 1930s by Ronald Pattinson comes from a series of gloriously detailed blog posts he made over the years, focusing on the changes in beer in England (mostly) in the period. If you want detailed tables of types, specific gravity, how taxation affected production, and more, this is your book. Finally, I relied heavily on Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation for Sam and Gemma’s research. Healing beer has a long history (as they note) but it’s hard to get many of these commercially for a wide variety of reasons.
On to the chapters!
Chapter 6: Otters, interestingly, went largely extinct in England in the 1950s due to pesticides, but are now coming back. (So they’d have been seen by Sam and his sons in the late 20s).
Chapter 7: Herbert Brereton Baker, who Gabe mentions, was the actual historical head of the Royal Chemical Society at the time. As noted, his wife was also a chemist (though the comments about it being rough for women at that point in time are also true in a general sense.)
When planning this book, I meant to spend more time with the issues with nitrogen and nitrogen production, and it ended up being a more glancing reference. The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery that Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler by Thomas Hager is a fascinating book looking at the essential aspects of nitrogen replacement, what happens when you run out of mountains of bat guano in the Falklands, and the development of the Haber-Bosch process that both saved lives (through fertilisers) and took them (through explosives). It’s 1928, so some of this process is still in progress at the time, but rapidly accelerating.
Chapter 25: The walk Sam and Gemma take near Castleton is taken from walking maps of the area, and the historical details they discuss are taken from guidebooks available in the period. (This means the archaeological bits have a lot of Victorian dubiousness attached.)
Chapter 31: The Maskelynes were a widely famous family of stage magicians and performers. I stumbled on the Davenport Collection which has a fascinating archive with many digitised items, including the program I used for discussion of this performance. If you go looking, note that it includes period typical racism in the program listing.
Jasper Maskelyne, the one performing here, was 26 at the time, his father had died in 1926. He went on to be better known for his accounts of work during World War 2 creating deceptions and camouflage in the effort to defeat the Nazis. (You may notice the ‘his accounts’ there is doing a certain amount of heavy lifting. Other accounts vary on how that went. Jasper’s Wikipedia page has more detail and sources.)
Thank you again for coming along on this story! This is the last book in the Mysterious Arts series, exploring arts and crafting in Albion in the 1920s. Mysterious Societies is my next 1920s series. The current plan is for book 1 in that series to be out in early 2027. In the meantime, I’ve more books coming from the 1860s and the late 1940s!
If you want to know more about what’s in the works, the best way is to sign up for my mailing list. You can also find me other places online. Check out my contact page for more details.
Happy reading!