I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here. A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.

The talkers are rising above the thinkers.

But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.