Maggie O’Farrell

I always feel you don't really know what it is you're doing until you're doing it.

And you don't know how much you don't know until you get right in the thick of it.

And so I suppose it's a bit similar that I always knew that I wanted with this novel to go right back to the very, very earliest people who lived in Ireland, partly because...

my father would only ever read Irish myths to us when we were children.

You know, I used to beg him to read Pippi Longstocking or the movements, but he never would.

He'd only read Irish myths.

But in a way, you know, it annoyed me at the time, but now I'm kind of glad that happened because the Irish myths are my kind of storytelling DNA.

It feels like the earliest, for me, the earliest way to tell a story.

And they are so strange and...

peculiar and you know the the actual land itself is a character because it speaks and it exists in a kind of it has a kind of personality in the trees will speak in the stones will speak and it's all to do with the earliest kind of inhabitants of Ireland that's Irish myth presupposes that those very earliest inhabitants merge themselves with the land itself so this sort of the land is the story in itself and the story is the land you can't really disentangle the two

Yeah, I suppose I had the idea.

I wanted to be able to tell the story of an entire stretch and history of a country through one plot of land and the changes that that plot of land has seen and has undergone and had to suffer in some cases.

So no, I don't think it's indifferent.

I think...

I suppose it's just part of what we are.

I think what fascinates me in all places is that you can stand on a patch of ground here where we are in London and beneath your feet could be a Roman villa, it could be a plague pit, it could be anything.

It doesn't go away.

It's still there.

And for me, I think storytelling is like that.

There's a kind of bedrock of experience underneath us all the time.