Maggie O’Farrell

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, a few words later.

And it was really extraordinary.

I've never had this experience before.

As soon as I had that first line, I could suddenly see the path of the whole novel.

I could see how I could do it.

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.

Only Irish folktales.

Well, my father would only ever read, as I said, only ever read Irish mythology to us.

And at the time it used to annoy us a bit because we used to beg him to try and read the Moomins or Pippi Longstocking to us, but he would only ever read Irish myth.

But actually now I see that it forms, that that world and those people and the narrative rules inside these myths form part of my storytelling DNA in a way.

And it was really important to me to try and transpose as much of that atmosphere of those tales to this novel.

So in Irish mythology, the land itself is like a character.