Will

And I suppose having that piece of truth about your family is one thing, but knowing how to turn that into a piece of fiction is something else entirely.

And presumably you mentioned it's sort of something that had sat with you for a long time until sort of out of nowhere you sort of heard the first line of the book.

But how did you go about taking that sort of simple fact of what he had done and think about how to turn it into a story with these characters and, of course, the huge themes that you incorporate as part of that?

That is fascinating.

We'll come back to the characters in a moment but I'm really pleased that you mentioned the time at which this was happening because I had exactly the same thought that this is a really extraordinary time in Irish history where you have the Great Famine just before what happens in this book and then the land war that comes after it which is where a lot of things changed about the ownership of land in Ireland.

And particularly with the famine coming just before it, you make it really clear that these families were made up of people who didn't have lots of grandparents or cousins or other members of their family because they'd all been wiped out.

And I wondered what that does for you as a writer of fiction in a way.

What dynamic does that give the writing experience?

That's so funny you said about the peninsula, because as I was reading it, I was thinking, I wonder where this peninsula is.

So I got out a map of Ireland.

And of course, the west coast of Ireland is all palinsulas.

It could be any one of those.

Yeah.

Very crafty of you.

Thank you very much for leaving me mapless.

As you say, that phrase that opens the novel, he was always a man of few words.

What's interesting is that that very quickly changes.

He becomes garrulous, as you say, because of an experience that he has.

And then he is a man of many, many words.

There's a big change that happens to him and it's to do with, well, partly expressed through his work as a mapper and his view of what a map does and how a map, as he was making it then, doesn't reflect the true area that they're trying to sort of describe.