Francis Spufford

Very exciting kind of recent writing that's been done about the alternatives in life.

So I'm thinking of books like Kate Atkinson's Life After Life and A God in Ruins.

And there's also a book people keep telling me to read by someone called Jenny Erpenbeck, who's a German writer, which sounds great, but I haven't read it yet and I can't presently remember its name.

And those are books that pay attention to the butterfly effect, so the kind of sensitivity of life to little changes and the multiple ways they could have gone.

And I wanted, from that tradition, I wanted the sense that there's an awful lot hanging on small changes, but I didn't want a kind of whole garden of different forking paths spreading out in different directions.

I only wanted my five characters to get one other possible life.

So in a way, in the middle of the book, the other tradition that really comes in is just the tradition of the big London novel, or even the big novel of city life altogether for lots of different cities, that is interested in the way that a big city provides a human anthill, to put it unkindly, a human community where lots and lots of lives are running along very close to each other, sometimes touching.

Sometimes not, but where you've got kind of immense human variety kind of channeled and molded by the same setting.

So I think there's a tradition of London novels I wanted to be in, too.

Very good recent ones being Zadie Smith's great NW set in northwest London.

Thank heavens, because my book's set in southeast London, though I managed not to call it S.E.,

Or for things that reach back into London's past, Sarah Waters' The Night Watch about the ambulance drivers during the Second World War, which is also a great Blitz novel.

Also a very good novel that pays attention to the way that the city runs.

In her case, the way that people who in peacetime were pariahs, kind of gay men and women, became in the Blitz the city's secret protectors and servants.

beetling around between the explosions, picking up the injured.

What else?

What else?

But then there's also the kind of book which pays attention to work, because I was also keen on, as a way of paying attention to time and the human experience of time, I thought you really shouldn't ignore the

all the time that goes into a working day.

There's an unfortunate tendency in literary fiction to go, the stuff that really matters is private life, and work is like a kind of great big blank that we can ignore, as if all human life only happened in the evenings.