I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.