David Szalay

I was aiming for sort of almost a sort of hyper realism, I guess, with the dialogue to...

mimic the way that people actually talk to each other that is in sort of going around in circles false starts long stretches where nothing seems to be being communicated in terms of the content but perhaps

stuff is being communicated in terms of something underneath.

The word okay, it's been often remarked that the word okay appears very often in this book, in the dialogue particularly.

But it often means subtly different things in subtly different contexts, I guess.

So, you know, there's a kind of submerged meaning going on often in those dialogues.

And also, I guess they're sometimes just comical, the sort of extreme deadpan