I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.