In good novelistic fashion, the discovery I’ve made is that it’s complicated. I think that’s one of good things about exploring these questions in a non-polemic, fictional way: you get to feel out territory rather than take positions. Through writing this, I can understand the impulse to faith, how people make meaning, how people make community, without having to say, do this, don’t do that, or I believe, I don’t believe.

As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.

There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.

I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.

I'm fascinated by the emergence of a global class. They're highly mobile; they reject the idea of place.

I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it's narcissistic and pointless.

When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.