John Connolly

I have a friend who's a special needs assistant.

I had to get a tetanus jab after being bitten by a child.

You know, there are troubled children out there.

But by and large, the children who have been put in these situations are not troubled.

And I'm not sure what it does to...

the mindset of a child who's already not entirely happy with their parents if they suddenly get dumped in the wilderness.

Do you know what I'm thinking about now?

I wouldn't even want to go to the Gwaeltacht.

Sure.

And she, obviously, her 20s and subsequent years were, they seemed like a bit of a social nightmare as far as I can tell.

She seems to have come out of it at the other end, but it clearly didn't help her.

I just find that idea that parents would

either out of desperation or just not caring enough, would hand their children over to strangers in that manner.

I find it extraordinary.

Yeah, I'd begun writing the book before I knew that the Elan schools existed.

So there was a resonance there for people in Maine who go, actually, there's nothing here that we haven't seen already.

And actually, we've seen worse.

Yeah, and where the books are set, yeah.

I worked there when I was younger and I wanted to give Parker an affection for a place that I had an affection for.

And also it wasn't colonised in the way that New York was or Boston was.