Jo Lennon

Well, I've actually been reading aloud to my partner who's been cutting down on his screen time.

So we've been delving into a biography of Napoleon, which is, I suppose...

not a bad choice in that it's quite removed in time and place from where we happen to be now.

Oh, it's long, it's quite intriguing, but there's lots of military tactics that I have to say I don't always completely appreciate.

Yes, it's Andrew Roberts and it's called Napoleon the Great.

Well, hearing the discussion about the kangaroo hunt in fiction, I couldn't help but think of the famous Australian film, a couple of decades old now, I think, called Wake in Fright, which features

a kangaroo hunt towards the end, and it's this really dark, nightmarish sequence that is, I think, used there to illustrate something that's quite dark and tortured about the characters' emotional states.

So sometimes I think animals are used to tell us something about the humans that they appear alongside, and sometimes they appear on their own terms as creatures in their own right that exist in the natural world of which we are a part.

And in my book, I think foxes are very urban creatures, much like humans.

And so the fox appears as a kind of spirit animal that speaks to themes of adaptation, survival and reinvention that emerge through the stories in the book.

Well, they inhabit our urban environments much as we inhabit theirs.

And I think certainly in London, the urban fox is just about everywhere.

And it's very striking to encounter them in the streets as we go about our business and they go about theirs.

So there's this really interesting overlap, I think, and that's always been a feature of the human and fox relationship.

This novel takes us to a world that starts out being very squarely about New York and New York in the recent past.

So we have a scene that takes us to

Hurricane Sandy, for instance.

And Raina is living in Harlem.

She has a young son and she's trying to get by.

She is also very much in love with Boyd, her smart, kind, but slightly reckless boyfriend, who, as you say, is in Rikers Island prison, at least when the novel opens.