Will Rycroft

How many times did you have to be a clown?

I think you should take Bailey's comment that this book is fucking funny and just take that back to your teachers at that school and go, Bailey thinks I've got it.

There's some interesting comments from them as well about, I suppose, about why the comedy works.

So Bailey carried on to say, each character is delightfully broken in their own way.

And Bernard Chichester said, searingly honest where it needs to be and outlandish the rest of the time.

I miss them all.

And I thought that was really interesting, this idea of missing those characters when the book finishes.

I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about how you went about constructing this family, because they are delightfully dysfunctional, let's say.

I'm going to come to you now, Angela, because, of course, you have an also dysfunctional family in your book.

And before I ask you about them and how you created them, I'm going to read a bookseller comment, which is a little bit longer than the others, but it's so brilliant that I have to read the whole thing.

And you'll just have to sit there and blush whilst you accept all these compliments.

This comment comes from Erica in Coventry, who said,

Oh, how I loved this novel.

The way the sibling relationships are rendered, not as simple bonds of affection, but as shifting patterns of dependence, rivalry, loyalty, and injury is extremely compelling.

These are siblings shaped by neglect, by the pressures of inheritance,

and by the strange enclosed world of thorn walk itself the author seems deeply interested in how brothers and sisters can become both witnesses to and prisoners of one another's lives protecting each other in one moment wounding each other in the next

and remaining bound together long after tenderness has curdled into grievance.

The novel's description suggests that each sibling embodies a different response to the family's decay, romantic longing, stubbornness, dreaminess, instability, escape, which gives the book a rich emotional texture and makes the family feel at once theatrical and painfully real.

First of all, what an incredible piece of comment to get about a woman.

So eloquent.