This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.

I'm a much better writer for being a father.

When I reached Fort Binjemma, for example, where my grandfather was stationed for a while, the whole Victorian fort was decaying. Barbed wire surrounded it, spray paint on the ancient walls claimed it as private property, and the moat where my grandfather and his men had grown crops - in desperation as the siege's hunger bit - was completely overgrown with bushes and trees.

Sometimes we don't notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.

Wouldn't that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music... That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.

Something I am now convinced of, after researching Everyone Brave, is that none of us is born courageous in all respects.

[My maternal grandmother ] was a teacher in London and elsewhere during the war, although the children she taught were not the "lost children" who feature in the novel - those come from my research.