Andrew O'Hagan

I always was drawn to books, probably for

pretty straightforward psychological reasons, always looking for an adult to depend on, looking for an adult who could take you in hand and show you the world.

So books that had that at the centre of it have always really appealed to me.

They have.

I mean, I've loved Henry James.

I mean, I think certainly all of my adult life.

He's not in any sense an author that you take to when you're very young.

I mean, he's complex as a stylist.

I mean, his paragraphs and sentences can be very long and very involved and full of sub clauses and so on.

But he's worth sticking with.

The ambassadors come into my mind as I was writing this book because that, again, is a book about friendship of a sort and the limits of friendship.

as this central character turns up in Paris to get involved in a domestic situation, you know, looking at somebody who might be marrying the wrong person.

The story came to mind because Henry James, when he was writing that book, he had a vision earlier in his life of people gathered in a square in a garden just off the Rue du Bac in Paris.

And there's a very famous line from Henry James, which is always quoted

one of the characters is heard to say to another, you've got to live.

It's a mistake not to.

And that sense of grasping onto life and making as much of it as you can was central to Mayflies, my most recent book.

The fact that the main character is in trouble and is dying, he reaches out to life and tries to put his arms around it in a whole new way.

That became a sort of theme for me and it was borrowed from Henry James because he sort of pinned that

Indian ambassadors.