Lee Forrest never thought he’d write a novel.

A long career in scientific research led to two nonfiction books and many articles for Cambridge University Press and other outlets, but his interest in fiction was sated mainly as an actor and director in theater.

That began to change years ago, when he started telling his now-grown children and their cousins stories to get them to fall sleep. “I was pretty much winging the stories,” Forrest says from London, where he and his wife, who live in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, visit often. “I had these guys raising Cain before bed, and I said, ‘Look, I’ll tell you a story.’ It became very popular with them.”

Forrest calls his tales ghost stories, but not all of them are your typical ethereal concoctions. “My inspiration was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, that kind of eerie mixture of the real and not quite,” he says. “It’s this feeling of being able to contact people who are not here any longer, through time travel or ghost stories.”

One of his stories, featuring an era-hopping heroine inspired by his niece Susan, became Beyond Australia, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a richly drawn and always-entertaining time-travel novel.”

In it, the character Susan, on a mission for her grandfather, travels back in time via an old linen chest. In 1872 Manhattan, where she poses as a young Australian boy, she locates an ancestor who was a surgeon, befriends his young wife and a young man named Stogie, and eventually confronts a moral choice in which saving a life could erase her own existence. Along the way, she’s immersed in the 19th century, surviving a world of primitive medicine, rigid social codes, and constant danger. “As a time traveler, the perils Susan faces are not crooks or hostile tribes but the very foreign culture she must fit in with—and it is dangerous enough,” Forrest says.

For the author, writing Beyond Australia allowed him to draw from his many interests, from history to medicine to theater. The character of Stogie, an Irish immigrant, is drawn in large part from Forrest’s early years in the theater. “His Irish-cum-gangster accent literally comes from a play I was in in high school, The Playboy of the Western World,” he says. “I heard the dialogue so much it kind of came easy to me to put it in Stogie’s mouth.”

Forrest grew up in upstate New York, and as a teenager, in addition to performing in high school plays, he developed an interest in photography, later becoming a photographer for the Yale Daily News. When Forrest and his wife moved to Pennsylvania, he took a position at a local hospital and soon discovered the Players Club of Swarthmore, an amateur theater group. Forrest has directed more than a dozen plays and has also adapted historical material for the stage.

He’s long had an interest in time-travel literature, directing plays such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Alan Ayckbourn’s Communicating Doors, and Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain, all of which involve jumps in time between different eras. He’s a fan of Kate Saunders’ Beswitched and Jennifer Donnelly’s Revolution, both of which immerse their protagonists in their time-travel eras (as opposed to just short visits).

“And that is also, I think, the main way my book differs from other time-travel books and other young adult books,” Forrest says. “The stress is not to either find 90 million gigavolts of power or to outwit some kind of bad guy who’s stolen something or other, but just to survive in this time. It is a major challenge.”

In fact, after a brief surprise that she’s actually traveled back in time, Susan finds her survival instinct kicking in right away as she immediately begins to assess her situation.

First, I had to find out when it was. I didn’t know how the linen chest/time machine worked. Was this November 20? I could buy a newspaper and look at the date, but I didn’t have any money. I could ask somebody, but could I talk to these people like I’d just gotten off an airplane?

The strangeness of it all was beginning to freak me out again. I was alone. I was really, really alone, like nobody I knew was with me on earth, and all the dead things from attics and museums and family albums had come alive around me.

Forrest calls Jack Finney’s 1970 novel Time and Again a primary influence. “That’s the granddaddy of time-travel books done right,” he says. “I glommed on to that book in a major way.”

Like Finney’s Simon Morley, Forrest’s Susan Ferguson travels to 19th-century New York, and the sci-fi aspects basically end with the time travel. What takes over from there is living in that time period. “It has a lot of history,” Forrest says of the novel. “And I’m not a qualified historian, but I have been deep into it all my life. Really, when I was a kid, I started collecting old issues of Harper’s Weekly when they showed up in antique shops or yard sales, and I got myself a bit of a collection.”

In the original ghost story that spawned Beyond Australia, Susan time-traveled with her cousin, Andrew. “They were having a boy-and-girl adventure, as all my ghost stories had [until that point], and then the boy just kind of dropped away,” Forrest explains. “I mean, he wasn’t contributing that much. He wasn’t necessary, until it was just Susan.”

Though Andrew was taken out during the writing process, a lot was put in, and eventually Forrest says he had to cut a 300-page book almost in half. “I had a total of three editors in the course of writing this book, and carving out half the book [required] discipline,” he says. “I did it for the sake of the story.”

In the book, Forrest uses a narrative device he now thinks was a mistake. “When I was writing this, I thought I was writing a novel, a serious book narrated by a kid, like Huckleberry Finn or The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, or True Grit, something like that,” he says. “I made the mistake of having Susan address readers as kids. Those other books didn’t do that, and I think that immediately classified this book as a young adult novel. That was not my intent, and I found myself caught unaware by it…I think the book has at least as much interest for grown-ups.”

Whatever its genre, Forrest thinks there’s a book beyond Beyond Australia.

Initially, he thought he might write a sequel that would follow Stogie and Susan, but he couldn’t find the right chemistry between the characters. Instead, he’s working on a book that follows Stogie as he leaves the city for the Adirondacks and a new life. “I was sort of disappointed to give up the original sequel I had in mind, but I’m not giving up entirely,” the author says.

Forrest says he doesn’t have a writing routine. “It’s not a discipline so much because it goes dark for periods, and sometimes when I can’t fall asleep, this thing forms, and I kind of stop wanting to go to sleep,” he says. “After an hour or so of that, I get up and start writing it down. And so it comes in bursts like that.”

Forrest is not consumed by the need to write, he says. “I don’t consider myself a writer as part of my identity; I consider myself as having an intermittent gift, and I don’t know where it comes from.”