Sarah Kanowski

Your younger brother Niall, who you were staying with in the Sudan and with whom you'd had this pivotal early experience of being sent off to live with your aunt while your father was in hospital in Dublin.

Niall died from kidney disease in 2004.

You shared so many intense experiences together, Colm.

When you came to write about your childhood in novelistic form in Nora Webster,

Were you conscious of what he would think of the story?

Was he in your mind as a presence as you wrote that book?

There's a very moving, strange sequence in that novel where Nora, the mother, encounters ghosts.

Were you surprised when you wrote that?

This most recent book, Long Island, started with an image for you too.

Tell me what that was.

There aren't many novels of happiness.

George Eliot wouldn't write it.

Helen Garner might actually.

From Eilish's Love Life to your own column, you live in LA much of the year with your partner.

How did the two of you meet?

You spend much of your time together in LA where he's based, which is, you know, a city famed for its highways and cars.

Do you get the chance to overhear people the way that you could overhear them in that sitting room or parlour in Enniscorthy?

When you do go back to Ireland, to your house by the sea or to Wexford, do you ever catch a glimpse of a man who might have been you had you not left?

I appreciate the answer and you are the opposite of a bore, Colm.

Colm Tobin, thank you so much for being my guest on Conversations.