What was your inspiration for writing the book? Purely empirical.
I've lived and worked in the area all my life and simply walking around the streets.
There's been this wonderful opportunity to observe what sort of diverse community of people live and interact in the Edgware Road area.
I've been a huge fan of swimming for many years and actually visiting the swimming pool,
which is where much of the action for the novel is set, really gave me the idea.
Imagine six people with very disparate, different backgrounds, all coming together,
having something in common which was not actually known to them at the time, and then an unforeseen event actually bringing them together.
That struck me as an incredibly exciting dynamic for the crux of the novel and where you could really see these diverse elements coming together.
How did you find the process of writing it? Did it come to you easily or some parts more of a struggle?
I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and I was always conscious at every stage of not wanting to put myself under any pressure.
If it was going to be unenjoyable, then I simply wasn't going to do it.
The way in which it worked for me was really to try and break it into constituent parts.
Each character story can almost be read as a short story in its own right.
And then the final section is where all of the characters actually come together and almost like chess,
play chess pieces, moving around on a chess board.
In terms of how and when I wrote it was really in in moments when it came to me, when I had that clarity.
I found early mornings were particularly good and given my day job actually being in hotels,
in foreign countries, having a blank desk with no disturbances was also a very good place in which to write.
And what was one thing you learnt was that that has helped you in your writing career?
I studied. It was the rather than English literature, although I did go on to do English subsequently.
But I think one of the great beauties of doing a liberal arts degree at a university like Oxford was really that right from the outset.
One was encouraged to do one's own research and to have half a sort of enquiring mind about the world.
And that idea of actually being very sort of thoughtful, gathering your results, almost a, dare I say,
a sort of Cartesian view of the world where you take the foundations you build up from there and you're always constantly learning,
trying to create new things.