I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.