Andrew O'Hagan

So I wanted to create a character in the book that was exactly like her.

And my imagination was ready for her because, of course, I had met her in real life.

I think it's one of the things that makes my generation distinctive.

People who were born perhaps from the late 60s to the mid 70s

That is almost a generation now.

Our fathers, if you're British, our fathers met other men in the army.

No, they did national service.

We didn't.

That had been abolished by the time we were young men.

And our children, on the other hand, meet people through social media.

And we were too early for that.

So there's a kind of, what I think of as Thatcher's children in the middle, where we met people at bus stops and in youth clubs and in record shops and in cafes.

And it's a whole world of...

that there was a lot of human contact and uncertainty.

Often you'd turn up at a place and there was nobody there.

You'd arrive at a pub hoping to have a meet-up and there was nobody around.

It was just a way of life and a way of friendship which has slightly disappeared.

And I wanted to write a novel that depended on all the truths of that world.

It takes a whole culture to make any good novel.

And the whole culture there was Scotland in the 1980s and then what happened over 30 years.