Robert Lukens

Well, your guess is as good as mine.

So about 2002, I think I've narrowed it to that year, I was living in this tiny little border village in Shropshire in England.

And on the day I arrived, there was a notice handwritten in the pub window that said postman wanted.

And so at the end of that day, I was a postman.

And every morning I'd head out at three o'clock in the morning and put my balaclava on and my headlamp torch and get on my Royal Mail push bike and head out through the cobbled streets and deliver the mail.

And at the end of every day, the last delivery was always the same.

Three miles out of town, up through the empty grazing fields.

emerging through the fog would be this grand, incredible manor house, really bride's head revisited kind of stuff.

But as you got closer, you would see it was crumbling and overgrown with vines and it was in a state of decay.

So I would deliver that mail and stand in the shadow of that house and watch the sun come up and the birds would start to twinkle in the bushes.

And it was such a beautiful moment, but also such a lonely and intense atmosphere.

And it just stayed with me the rest of my life.

And now 17, 18 years later when I went to write this novel, which may have been my last attempt at writing a novel, and I thought I'm just going to write from my guts and my mind reached to that place.

Wow.

And so my novel is set in that house.

Yes.

Yeah, so a lot of these grand houses in Britain at the time, after the Second World War, no one could afford to run these places anymore.

You couldn't have 20 staff running these places.

So a lot of them were converted into institutions, into convalescence hospitals and these kind of...

governmental buildings and so a lot of these places were turned into sort of halfway houses or for for people that didn't quite fit into hospital they weren't quite ready for prison yet people didn't know where to put them and so some of these places were set up and and that was sort of the inspiration for this story the everlasting sunday robert lukin's debut novel how exciting