My grandmother's first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

Capturing a beautiful moment in a photo is something I'm very passionate about.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.