Q11 - The character of Thomas Robinson is particularly insightful and finely wrought. Did you begin the novel with an idea of him as a character and build the novel out from there? If not, what was your starting point and in what ways did the novel develop from that nexus?

A - My novel began with the simple idea of a home being broken into by armed strangers. This is hardly an original idea, but I lay awake at night and thought of what it would really be like for the people inside. The murder scene with the terrified boy standing petrified in his hiding place metres away from his dead mother while her killers ransack her bedroom, grew out of this first thought,and from there I had the genesis of the character of Thomas Robinson, who is only fifteen and burns to avenge his mother's murder. So yes, Thomas was the first character and my planning began with his terrible life-changing experience, which incidentally explains the quotation from Doctor Zhivago at the beginning of the book. I think that I knew soon afterwards that Thomas's father was a cold repressed man and that their relationship would be crucial to the book's plot. The father's beautiful new wife, Greta whom Thomas accuses of his mother's murder, came out of my imagining the father, and then she quickly took on a life of her own. I have to say that I always really liked Greta, and found I could see her more clearly in my mind's eye than any of my other characters, even though she began in my imagination later than them.