Will

Can you tell us a little bit about, I suppose, what I'm very badly explaining there, the sort of idea of the connection between mapping, colonialism, history, time, what really a map should be containing?

Tell me why that's such a fascinating thing to write about.

There is an element to which the writing of a novel is like time travel.

So the novelist is able, of course, to control where they're looking and they know that the story they're telling goes here, there and everywhere.

And they can experience all those times at the same time when they're writing and decide where to put the reader at various points in the novel.

And you do this quite audaciously in this book, which is after the first section of the book where we think we sort of know where we are and when we are.

You take us to a completely different time period, but in the same place, and give us a real sense of how much older the land is than the people that we've met initially.

When you have that control as a novelist, do you have to be quite careful about how you exercise it, the work that's required to decide where to insert the bits of information that the reader needs to understand your story?

There's a moment in the book where you talk about how the land is indifferent to what is happening around it, because of course it's been there for so long and has seen people come and go and all the rest of it.

That's what one character says, but I wondered whether that felt true to you as the novelist, because it feels like the land is quite invested in what's happening.

It certainly seems to be observing it in the same way that we as the reader do.

There's a beautiful section of the book where you were talking about how the house that they were living in was made up of a piece of wood from over here, a piece of stone from over there, and how this sort of combined history happened to be the thing that they were living in now.

And that felt very much, I suppose, like how those Irish myths that you were talking about are assembled from, you know, a piece from here, a piece from there.

Do you feel, I suppose, in a way that a novel like this is becoming part of that palimpsest of sort of literary tradition?

I am very wary of not spoiling anything in terms of the story for people, but we meet various children of the family and they are all so distinct as characters and they all have very different personalities and they go on to do very different things in their lives.

And I think that each reader will probably have their favourite, the one that they're most invested in.

But I wondered whether you as the author found yourself drawn to any of those characters more than the others, or is that very much like asking you to choose your favourite child?

As any good mother, you were very fair to your children.

Thank you.

Equal attention.