Maggie O’Farrell

So it turns out that, like all myths, part of it is fiction and part of it is actually true.

Well, the other thing I knew about him was that his son, my great-grandfather, took a very different path in life.

I don't know if it's a spoiler to say what he did.

So he became a Jesuit, and then later in life he left the church and became a mapper like his father did.

And that dynamic, that father-son relationship has always really fascinated me.

Because, you know, to do something like become a Jesuit, it's not something that happens by accident.

It takes many, many years.

And then to leave all that behind and then to end up doing the same job as your father, that always really interested me, that trajectory.

And so I always thought of them, the two of them, the father and son, what that must have been like.

And so I did.

I've been thinking about writing about them for ages.

And then what happened was that one of my father's siblings sadly died and we were sent quite a lot of stuff pertaining to our family from his widow.

And in among these things was a hand-drawn, beautifully hand-drawn map by Liam in the book.

And in it, it features a tiny, tiny portrait of his father standing behind a British redcoat soldier who was peering into a theodolite.

and it's tiny it's about the size of a postage stamp this little portrait and i blew it up one day on my phone and i suddenly thought there he is that's him yeah that's who i've been thinking about all these years and it wasn't long after that until i sort of got the first sentence for the book in my head which was his father was always a man a few words and it was like a key turning in a lock as soon as i had that sentence i could somehow see how to write the novel

I think I just wanted to really understand what had happened to the whole country during those years.

And you can read on a page that a million people died, but that's a fifth of the population of the country, and a further million emigrated.

But I think what I wanted to focus on with the novel was the people who were left behind, what happened to them and what it must have been like.

The country was absolutely ravaged and turned upside down, and there was an enormous amount of...

social and political and economic upheaval.