Sarah Moss

Yeah, okay.

I see you, girl.

I'll go on this ride.

I'd say that it's set in one day on a holiday park in Scotland on the banks of Loch and it rains all day and we follow six households from morning through to evening with one person from each household.

And the question is really how a group of people cope in isolation when everything that they'd hoped for isn't happening.

It didn't feel like a choice.

I started thinking about the book when we were...

in Scotland in a holiday park and it rained all the time and at the time I was officially working on a much heavier and more scholarly novel and I became fascinated by these little worlds each of these damp little cabins held its own small world of a family and they were all next to each other but people weren't really talking to each other and I could never quite work out why they weren't talking to each other but I didn't talk to anybody either so clearly whatever it was I shared it

So there we all were kind of going around in some kind of strange orbit.

And that became so fascinating to me that I started writing about it.

Yes.

Well, I've always thought holidays have always interested me for writing because in some ways it's a very odd thing to do.

You remove yourself from all your usual sources of support and entertainment and you go off and isolate yourself with people who, while doubtless you love them very much, are perhaps not the people with whom you would always choose to spend two weeks in complete isolation.

So all those family tensions are put under extra pressure and that's really interesting from a novelistic point of view.

I have trouble with the idea of nature writing because for so much of its history, I think it's been inadvertently very conservative.

It tends to be very invested in solitude and ideas of inspiration that's not very inclusive.

And I think if we imagine that the best or the only authentic encounters with the natural world take place in remote places where somebody's alone in a wild and beautiful landscape,

That's an awful lot of space for one ego to take up on a crowded planet.

And it also makes those experiences necessarily inaccessible to anybody who doesn't have transport, time, skills, physical strength to get into those places.

So I'm much more interested in ways of thinking about the natural world that are to do with community and the small scale and also to recognise that we are part of that natural world.