Maggie O’Farrell

It has opinions.

It can change the direction of its human compatriots.

Trees can speak.

It has opinions.

Yeah.

It's actually a person that interacts, or it's an entity that interacts with the plot.

And I really wanted that to come across in the novel.

And there are certain elements of the novel that lean heavily on Irish myth.

There's a fish in the novel, which is quite important.

I did at one point come – I write in a studio at the bottom of the garden and I did come up and I said to my children, I think my novel is going to have a talking fish in it.

I mean they're teenagers now.

They were a little bit skeptical about that.

But the fish are very important in Irish mythology and there's a wolfhound in the novel called Bran and he's called after Finn McCool's dog.

No, as you can probably tell by the way I speak.

No, I left when I was really young.

I was born in Derry and then we moved to Wales when I was still quite young and then Scotland.

I mean, maybe I said wary, but I think, you know, I can't listen to myself in my very British voice saying the sentence, I'm Irish, just because it just sounds grating to my ear and probably I'm sure to other people's too.

So I think it's a strange thing.

You know, I think anyone who...

doesn't grow up in the country they were born in or has maybe an accent at odds with their name as I do there's always a sense of a kind of ghost self that walks along beside you and you always have this awareness I think of what could I have been who would I have been if we had stayed and I know that I would have sounded completely different and I might have been a different person