My grandmother was from Guelph, Ont. I grew up playing ice hockey, I'm a massive fan. A great-uncle who was in the early days of the NHL played for the Chicago Blackhawks.

American cops didn't create that atmosphere, they're the ones though who have to live with it on a daily basis. These are generalisations; you can't make generalisations about hundreds of thousands of people. The New York Police Department, for instance, has 38,000 police officers in it. But most cops, when I talk to them, desperately care about the victims of gun violence. They see it, they experience it.

There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.

I think people will be surprised at some of the things about the shootings by policemen of unarmed African-American men. But I also think it's a balanced view. Balance has become almost a dirty word these days. It seems we're supposed to pick one side or the other. But these issues are extremely complicated. I think people will be surprised at some of that.

With a 660-page book, you don't read every sentence aloud. I am terrified for the poor guy doing the audio book. But I do because I think we hear them aloud even if it's not an audio book. The other goofy thing I do is I examine the shape of the words but not the words themselves. Then I ask myself, "Does it look like what it is?" If it's a sequence where I want to grab the reader and not let the reader go then it needs to look dense. But at times I want the reader to focus on a certain word or a certain image and pause there.

We need to do something about gun violence in America. But every time one of these things happen, we say the same thing, and then we don't seem to be able to do anything. And that needs to change.

How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?