The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

People had tell me the most personal things. People I'd never met before would say thing like "Oh, that was the summer I had an affair with my neighbor." The 1976 heatwave occupies a peculiar place in people's psyches.

Despite being from Ireland, I've always avoided writing about it, for two reasons. For a very small country, Ireland has produced an astonishing number of literary geniuses, and at some level I probably never felt, having left as a toddler, that I had the right to try and add my voice. That's part of it. But I also didn't want to write something that was the equivalent of the Irish theme pub. You find them all over the world. The idea of producing a novel that might replicate that type of ersatz really set my teeth on edge.

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.

In the course of writing a book I'll produce loads of pieces of paper to help the novel itself. Diagrams, charts, family trees. And at the end of each book I'll pack it all away. It takes me a while to do it - it's like a relationship that way; there's a period of letting - go, of grief, in a way - but then I box it up, label it, and put it in the attic.

Always, at the end of every book, there are things you will be unsatisfied with, and still more things that later on you will realize were not right. But mistakes are part of what a book is. That itchy, dissatisfied feeling at the end of a novel is useful. It's what keeps you writing and gets you writing the next one. It's what keeps you learning.