Ayad Akhtar

Love of mine, someday you will die, but I'll be close behind.

I'll follow you into the dark.

This is The Bookshelf on Radio National on air and via the ABC Listen app and also via podcast.

Well, because it is a novel.

I'm a dramatic writer and I need to composite and compress and sharpen and concoct.

I need to create opportunities for the articulation of conflict.

Often in life, conflicts are buried and they only come out in indirect ways.

That kind of storytelling doesn't interest me.

I'm not particularly interested in the surface that

bubbles with all kinds of unspoken stuff.

I'm a dramatist, so people say what they think and they act and they do things.

They do big things.

And more importantly, I'm playing with the illusion and reality dimension of the narrative because we're living in a time where entertainment has become the dominant model of politics and thought.

And this era of the collapse of fact into fiction is something that I wanted the book to reflect.

I wanted it to reflect that confusion around reality.