Maggie O’Farrell

Thank you so much for having me.

It's lovely to be here.

Oh, well, I'd say it crept up on me very slowly.

I've always really been interested in the life of my great-great-grandfather, on whom, to us, the character is based.

He worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the mid-19th century, just after the Great Famine had taken place.

And...

I thought about him for years and I thought about his son for years.

His son was my great-grandfather and he took a very different path in life initially from his father's.

He became a Jesuit, which, as anyone knows anything about Catholicism, is not a job you just happen to fall into.

It's something that you really, really commit yourself to and it takes years to train.

He was a Jesuit for a while and then he left, quite astonishingly, hence my existence and the existence of all my cousins and siblings here.

And he came full circle and became a mapper like his father.

So the two of them was always really interested in me, but I could never really see a way forward to making into a novel until I was on a train a few years ago on the way from Belfast to Dublin.

And just suddenly, and I wish this happened more often, Sam, but the very first line of the book just slid into my head, which is his father was ever a man of few words.

And it was really extraordinary.

Well, it's based on the lives of what I could find out of the lives of my great-great-grandfather and my great-grandfather, which wasn't a huge amount, to be honest.

But I've woven a novel around the scant details that we have about them.

I've always really been fascinated in maps and the idea of mapping and the impulse to map.

I think it is a real human instinct to do it.

It actually, as humans, it predates our ability to write.