Where are you right now?  

I'm in a rather drab office at IULM University in Milan, where I run a little post grad degree in translation. It would be hard to imagine a less memorable room.

Where do you write?

Wherever I am when I have a couple of spare hours for writing. That mainly means my office in Verona, a room almost as nondescript as this. But the train is also good, between Verona and Milan. Really, anywhere where you can concentrate.

How do you write?

Essays and non-fiction I usually write straight onto the laptop, re-elaborating endlessly. But when it comes to a novel I work by hand. I love the silence and the rhythm writing by hand. I start each day transcribing the previous day's work onto the computer, rereading, editing, rewriting. That gets me over the early morning inertia. Then I switch back to paper to push the book on.

What keeps you writing?

This is such a good question I have no answer. My suspicions are that the motives are not honourable. I certainly yearn to come up with a book that feels truly different.

Who do you write for?

Those who will read what I want to write.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?

Ever since we've had email I've been running things past my older brother, a painter who lives in the States. John is a wonderful reader because he says when he likes and when he doesn't like things in the simplest way.

How do you know if your work is good?

I'm not sure if I can go with the premise behind this question. Do I know? Really? Sometimes I think I know. Very often I change my mind. But I do know when a piece of writing is finished. I can do no more. And that's far more useful than knowing if it's good.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

I do, yes. I have a couple of characters waiting for a book. I have some story ideas waiting for characters. I do my best to introduce them to each other, but these are not things one wishes to hurry.

Which book do you wish you'd written?

There were moments when I wished I had written Coetzee's Disgrace, Or something like it. In many ways the book felt so close. Or Berhard's Concrete. But in general what you long to do is something that's supremely your own and entirely new.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?

I don't understand this question. I can't see why a literary pleasure should be guilty. Perhaps you mean am I ashamed of liking some book or other. No. I do have a divided mind over many things, but not over the books I like. When I like a book I shout it. Same when I hate it.

Which writer made you want to write?

A toss up between Henry Green (Partygoing) and Samuel Beckett (Molloy)

Who's the most exciting author writing today?

How could there ever be a single answer to that question? It smacks of blurb talk.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?

God knows. A lawyer. I've always envied criminal lawyers. Or a teacher, which I am anyway. I love teaching. I love being away from writing for a couple of days a week. I love it when one of my ex-students gets a good book to translate and does well.

What next?

I'm excited by the first fifty or so pages of a novel I've written. So I suppose it'll be that. Provisionally titled: In the Dhamma Kitchen.

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Teach Us to Sit Still is published by Harvill Secker.

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Filthy Talk for Troubled Times by Neil LaBute 

Remarkable for the pace and power of the dialogue. Seriously dark and side splittingly funny. I saw this, LaBute's first play, revived at the Luccille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village recently and it felt as fresh and current as ever.

Greene on Capri by Shirley Hazzard

An elegant and beautifully observed memoir that records the author's friendship with Graham Greene played out against the backdrop of Capri. Both the man and the island are presented in compelling and economical fashion. An immensely pleasurable book that is hard not to read in one sitting.

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In the Flesh is published by Chatto and Windus.

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He plays the part well, sauntering in to the magisterial tea room at Claridges in full off-duty-celebrity uniform of jogging suit, baseball cap and dark glasses.  He must be the last author in the business to be put up in Claridges but has the good grace to feel bemused at the five star treatment and huge media interest.  At 46, he is still finding a new generation of readers as well as absolute loyalty from the kids who read his first novel Less Than Zero when it was first published, and are in middle age now. 

Less than Zero was written in college and hit the book shops when he was only 24, and depicts a life unapologetically glitzy and shallow, a strong cocktail of entitled privilege, dispassionate sex and casual drug taking, spiked with the growing threat of violence.   Clay, an eighteen year old college student returns home to LA for Christmas and sleepwalks through a series of bars, clubs and house parties with his friends Julian, Trent and Rip, and ex-girlfriend Blair.  The book propelled Ellis front and centre stage from the off, despite meeting a hailstorm of bad reviews.  His unsentimental portrayal of youth was shockingly nihilistic at the time, and remains so to this day.  He seems to have presaged something of today's youth culture, with its twin pillars of celebrity and materialism. 

Less than Zero, like American Psycho and Lunar Park to follow, has a flat, neutral quality, which has allowed it to age like Hollywood star with an excellent plastic surgeon, finding new currency with each successive generation of youth.  A quarter of a century after it was first published, he has written a follow up, Imperial Bedrooms, which revisits the cast of the first book, who are all as dysfunctional, shallow and screwed up as their early years might have suggested.   

It is written in the same affectless tone that permeates Less than Zero, with the paranoia levels amplified.  The impression is of an excessively violent book, but in fact most of the violence is implied, or occurs off-stage.  It strikes me that this lurking sense of threat must be the most technically difficult aspect of the book, but in fact, Ellis says, it was an inevitable externalization of what he was feeling at the time. "I was there.  I was there the whole time.  It was going on in my life; it just came out in the writing. I don't think I would have written that book if I had not been going through something similar to Clay.  Now, I was not involved with a nefarious rich dude who can kidnap people and have them offed, or a drugs cartel," he laughs, "but there were definitely similarities between what was going on in my life and what was going on in Clay's.  That's just always how it is.  I mean, if I look back on any of the books I've written, there are definite correlations between the narrator and myself, probably no more so than Patrick Bateman."

Patrick Bateman, the yuppie serial killer, who posed and slashed his way through American Psycho, is Ellis' most notorious creation and by his own account, a version of himself.  When it was first published in 1991, there was an "awful avalanche of negativity." Information about the contents of the novel had been leaked to the press and a campaign of a priori criticism snowballed to epic proportions.  "But you know what?  Once that book was published, it stopped; the controversy completely stopped.  Because the months of controversy leading up to that book presented the novel as a mountain of violent pornography, like it was 400 pages of the Marquis de Sade, and when the book came out, I think there was a bit of disappointment that it really wasn't as awful as the press had made it out to be.  People saw that there was actually an aesthetic plan to the book." 

After such a storm of aspersion, American Psycho has gone on to assume a revered position in the Canon of Modern American Literature, a twist that has delighted Ellis, even though he insists the excoriating reviews never bothered him.  "I feel vindicated, yes I do," he says.  "I always believed in the book.  I always thought it was what I intended it to be and I thought sooner or later people will ultimately get it.  I also thought the book was very funny, a comedy of manners. I wasn't quite sure if the murder sequences were actually happening or these sick fantasies in his head, you know...whatever," (his conversation is salted with these slightly camp, Californian whatever's), "I always thought that a reader was going to read this book at some time in the future and get it and all would be, if not well, then at least the controversy would have died down.  And it has, it really has.  There is no more controversy about that book."

Ellis grew up in a wealthy Californian household dominated by an overbearing, violent father, who cast a long shadow over his son.  Even now, close to twenty years after his death, Easton Ellis refers repeatedly to "daddy issues" and cites his malign influence as an ongoing source of unhappiness that continues both to corrode him and fuel his need to write.  His books are saturated with paranoia, fear and violence, which he admits is a familiar state of being, stemming directly from "the darkness of my childhood, the monster in the house."

As a child, he was drawn to books as a means of escape, to comics and Stephen King novels, before moving on to Hemmingway and Joan Didion (indeed, Less than Zero has a more then a little in common with Play it as it Lays.)  But it was The Sun Also Rises that turned Ellis from a reader in to a writer after staying up all night to cram for a test aged 14.  "I read it in one sitting.  I couldn't put it down.  It was electrifying, it changed my life," he remembers.  "I read it again, I didn't sleep at all that night, I read it twice in one night.  It was a kind of fantastic experience looking back on it.  You only have that experience once or twice in your life. It was a moment, it was a huge night, and it was like, 'I'm going to write novels now.' 

Each of his books have grown out of experiences or issues in his own life, "usually associated with pain, stress, chaos; someone doesn't love you.  My problems with dealing with the futility of life."  But despite the many close parallels between the lives of his characters and his own, Ellis seems to have little affection for his creations.  They are weak, shallow, without morals or principles.  Few of them seem capable of joy.  Few find a happy ending.  "The act of writing has nothing to do with caring about the characters," he points out.  "It has nothing to do with whether they're fantastic or vile or whatever; it's just a need." 

Like his character Clay in Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis moved back to LA from New York, where he realised he'd "stayed at the party too long."  He felt, in his last years there, a growing impatience and annoyance at the East Coast literary scene.  "All my friends were writers and there was always another reading to go to, always another PEN dinner I had to attend - I didn't have to but everyone was going and if I didn't it would be so much more complicated than if I just went to the fucking thing and dealt with it and endured it.  It was like the last gasp of glamour in the publishing industry was happening and I went along with it, but I don't know that I ever fully felt it."  A dangerous kind of boredom ensued and "very bad habits began to announce themselves," he says.  "I was doing a lot more drugs and I was hanging out with people I would never have hung out with before.  You just hit a point where you just think, 'what the hell am I doing?'"  Breaking point came when his friend Mike Kaplin died in 2004.  The two were extremely close ("I hesitate to say I was with him, but we had a very close relationship.") and Ellis still sounds shocked at the loss, "Out of the blue this healthy 30 year old guy dies of a massive aneurism and it was like, boom!" Ellis packed his bags and left New York immediately.

In LA he seems to have found, for the time being at least, some degree of sanctuary and stability.  He admits there are far fewer parties, and feels relieved of some of the pressure he felt in New York; "Not as much is required of you, you don't have to be so smart." Fittingly, given his new location, his new work is all for film and TV, "that to me right now is the novel I'm most interested in."  If the medium is a departure, the material isn't.  The series he's currently developing is about surveillance technology and stalking, and follows a group of young people in New York as they negotiate relationships in the digital age.  It's familiar, but by no means tired, ground, and Ellis' particular specialism, "So much paranoia," he laughs, "so much anxiety!"  He sounds positively gleeful.

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Imperial Bedrooms is published by Picador.

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We arrive from overheated Naples in the late afternoon into Gatwick's north terminal toting too much luggage onto the train to Euston, where the cooler temperature comes as a relief and we walk down Gower Street, past the University of London, to a hotel where we're shown into a basement suite with a little garden at the back, a blown fuse in the bathroom, and a Channel Four program running on the TV, a show about sex education in which eleven, twelve, and thirteen year olds evaluate a line-up of five nude men, from whom they are asked the choose the gay one, fiddling and squirming as they do so, shocked to learn it is the chubby older fellow and not the young muscled one, this at 8:30 in the evening, children viewing naked men on primetime, most saying they expect gay people to be fit and fancy and a bit effeminate, until a boy in the first row says it has nothing to do with looks, the host then congratulating him on his correct answer, followed by applause.  The pagan British.  No churchly minders left to decry these wicked modern ways.  Moral opprobrium reserved, instead, we learn, for the parents who've been discovered allowing their children to cycle to school.     

Tuesday

You don't get many good reads.  Not that you hear about.  Friends can be enthusiastic, family supportive, publishers optimistic, reviewers damning or praising, but after years of labouring on sentences and scenes edited over and over to produce an interrelated whole, you don't often, or perhaps ever, have the pleasure of hearing a practiced, trained reader describe his or her experience of your work in depth.  This morning, however, I'm given that pleasure by a reporter writing a piece for one of the Sunday papers.  He wrote his dissertation on Keats.

He's not afraid to be moved by words.  To most of his questions, I answer, simply, Yes, and then elaborate a bit on what he's noticed, amazed and delighted that he's read my book so carefully.  We end up talking a lot about masculinity.  The power and the prison of it.  How's it ethos infuses the violent worlds of the military and high finance.  How it doesn't seem like a coincidence that the credit bubble unfolded in the same decade as the American invasion of Iraq.

That evening I meet my British publishers for the first time at a dinner in Soho, along with some journalists, a bookseller, and the editorial assistant who first championed by novel.  Though I come to Britain fairly frequently, this evening is a homecoming of sorts.    I went to school in England when I was a kid; my father was English; I'm a British citizen; and half the stories in my first book were set here, along with many of my earliest memories.  Walking back to my hotel afterwards, slightly drunk, I feel as happy as I have in months.

Wednesday

Wembley.  Curry joints, prawn brokers, mini-cab dispatch offices, betting shops, and once you're off the high street, row houses with cement yards and drawn shades.  Express trains shoot by at startling speeds.  This morning I did an interview with the BBC and then we packed up and schlepped our luggage once more onto the Tube to this friend's empty flat.  On the ride out I finished reading a book called Methland by Nick Reding about the devastating rise of methamphetamine in rural America, particularly in farming towns in the Midwest, where I went to graduate school.  Though I've never done it, meth has always fascinated me for two reasons: (1) it doesn't fit the popular imagination of an American drug problem because it isn't chiefly urban, most of its users are white, and until the early part of this century, it was mostly manufactured in the US, not imported; and (2) it has the odd added feature of having flourished in two otherwise deeply disconnected places--dying small towns and the gay night life of New York and San Francisco.  It strikes me as the most nihilistic of drugs with none of the soft charms of marijuana or the sensory fantasia of hallucinogens, nor even the initial muted bliss of opiates, the drug of choice, I would guess, after booze, for what the poet Roethke called the 'heavy bored' out here in Wembley.

Thursday

When you're travelling you're often left with random hours before or between meetings which at home would be filled by finally doing the laundry or buying food but which on the road sit their uselessness down in front of you with an accusing glare.  There are always more books to read, but this morning my mind is remaining aloof from my brain and I'm good for little more than stimulus.  Our absent host has an enormous television, a Blue Ray player, and a copy of New Moon, an instalment of the Twilight books-flicks franchise.  The movie is bad--miserably written, deathly earnest, puerile--but what's more interesting is this Blue Ray thing, which by taking high-definition to the next level seems to have completed the move away from the textured richness of film at its 70mm apogee to the apparent transparency of film as video.  Of course, it's chock full of CGI, but you apprehend the people in the picture as hyper-real floaters against that dream backdrop.  In film, every era has a technology that it considers more realistic than the next (witness Hollywood's recent reinvention of 3D), and Blue Ray is in that same line.  All content aside, New Moon Blue Ray edition makes Lawrence of Arabia look like a post-impressionist painting.  The same evolving conception of what counts as 'real' can be found in literature, where Clarissa's epistolary confessions play to the same readerly desire for the transparent entry into lived experience as Infinite Jest's tunnelling into the mind of the addict.  I believe in the power of words, I do.  And yet Taylor Launter's chest looks awfully nice on Blue Ray.

Empty hours killed, I have lunch with an old friend of my parent's whose come down from the Lake District to meet me at the British Museum. 

Friday

Down to West Sussex to visit my uncle and meet up with my mother, whose on her way to Scotland.  My other uncle is up from Hampshire and along with a few cousins we all spend the gorgeous summer afternoon in the garden under the shade of an ash tree, drinking ice water and tea, before heading to dinner at the decaying manor house of some batty old aristocrats who've just taken an American couple for a visit to the recently opened Rolls Royce factory up the road.  There is discussion about the company now being German-owned.  Much opposition to the factory being placed where is was on the South Downs, though they have installed a grass roof where birds now nest.  After dinner we take a walk in the gardens.  There are weeds coming up through the tarmac of the tennis court and the wood of the arboretum is ancient and cracked.  It doesn't get dark until after ten. 

Saturday

The news is full of this manhunt in Northumberland.  A steroids user--the photos tell the story--gets out of prison, kills his ex-wife's lover, shoots her in the stomach, and kills a cop before the police contain him in a village where he used to camp and hunt.  Americans are so inured to this sort of gun violence that this story would come much later in the broadcast back in the States.  Here, it's the lead on every paper and news update.  My mother's flight to Glasgow is cancelled and so she returns from Gatwick to spend another night down here near Arundel.  I've been coming to this part of the world since I was a boy, visiting my uncle, a former farmer, in all the various houses, cottages, and shacks he's lived in over the years, and it feels deeply familiar and calming. Another day of pleasant milling about with family in and out of the house and garden.  At home, I am a scrooge of time, meting it out to myself with such spurious precision and worry.  But here, on what is now pure holiday, it's as motionless as the blue sky and as plentiful. 

Sunday

Our last full day before returning to New York.  We get up early and my uncle drives us and my mother over toward Southampton.  My father grew up outside the city, in Chilworth.  We pass by my grandparent's old house on the way to the cemetery where my father's ashes are buried.  In the twenty-five years since his death I have been here only once, on the day, twenty-years ago, when my grandmother was buried beside him.  His plaque is a flat stone in the ground.  We clear the grass away from its edges and brush away the dirt and leaves.  The 'n' and 'l' of 'In Loving Memory' are peeled back.  It seems the letters have been applied to the stone rather than carved in it.  My uncle says he and his brother will do something about it, get it fixed somehow.  We haven't brought any flowers.  Frankly, none of us sees why one would.     

On the way back, we drop my mother at the airport in Southampton where she's booked another flight to Glasgow.  We have a drink at a pub before getting back to my uncle's house and after dinner we watch the end of the World Cup Final, where in the final minutes of overtime, the Spanish striker finally strikes. 

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Union Atlantic is published by Tuskar Rock.   

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The Privileges is published by Corsair.

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In Cove Park, which is on the Loch Long peninsula in Scotland. It is a three-month residency on one of the most beautiful spots on earth. I have discovered the Glaswegian accent makes me swoon.

Where do you write?

In my study at home but also in coffee shops near home, or at the local library. I have notebooks and a journal and they always travel with me. Three years ago I started writing in long-hand again, to escape the tyranny of the digital age.

How do you write?

I wake up every morning, I make my coffee, slip into my "slug-suit" (i.e. T-shirt and shorts in summer, hoodie and track pants in winter) and I begin to write. I set a limit of at least 1500 words a day. I'll make lunch and then take go to a coffee shop or the library and work some more. This is the routine I need. But there are times, usually when a new idea comes or I have a deadline, when I am writing at any hour. It is one of my favourite moments, the arrival of a new thought, surrounded by the ghostly murmurs of the middle of the night.

What keeps you writing?

I see what I do as an apprenticeship, but one that will last all my life. I want to become better at my craft. There are moments where I am prey to the same self-doubts, narcissism or despair that affects most writers, but when I am excited by what I am writing, when I am in that state, it is joyous and I cannot believe my good fortune.

Who do you write for?

The first draft is always for myself. The others are for the best reader I can imagine.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?

I have long-standing collaborations in theatre with the playwrights Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves; with a composer, Irine Vela; with a filmmaker Spiro Economopoulos; and with a photographer, Zoe Ali. I meet regularly with the writers Angela Savage, Jeana Vithoulkas, Anaya Letter and Jessica Migotto. (They all were quick to tell me where I got women wrong in initial drafts of The Slap!) I have the best editor I can imagine in Jane Palfreyman. And I always show my work to my partner, Wayne van der Stelt, who is an excellent reader.

            Writing does require spaces of solitude, the "room of one's own" but I think we also need the communication of shared passions, critical engagement with the questions of our craft, and to be reminded of everything that is going on in the world, artistically and politically. All of this feeds into my work.

How do you know if your work is good?

By not boring myself. I read it back aloud and I have learnt to trust my ear. I try to avoid the literary equivalent of the interminable guitar solo.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

Yes, they are hidden in old notebooks, old files on three-inch floppy disks. Sometimes you take them out and it is like looking at old photographs, you think, I forgot about her, I want to something with him.

Which book do you wish you'd written?

Nikos Katzantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ. I recently read David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and though I grew up on the other side of the world, it perfectly captured what it was to be a teenager in the early eighties.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?

Agatha Christie. I can reread them again and again. But with some of them you do know she was phoning it in. But at her best - Five Little Pigs or Mrs. McGinty's Dead - there is nothing to feel guilty about.

Which writer made you want to write?

The Russians, especially Dostoevsky, Carson McCullers, Norman Mailer and Pauline Kael.  Bret Easton Ellis, Colm Tóibín and David Peace keep me wanting to be better writer.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?

David Peace

If you weren't writing you'd be...?

... bitter.

What next?

I'm going to walk to Kilgreggan along the Barbour Road, looking down on Loch Long, thinking about how to convey the Glaswegian accent in the new novel I am writing.

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The Slap is published by Tuskar Rock.

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He does, however, set his sights high, and carries the kind of ambition, which coupled with his evident talent, hints at great things.  His first novel, Ilustrado, which has just been published in the UK, won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript form.  He had no publisher and no agent at the time, having spent ten years collecting rejection slips.  It was the second time he'd put the book forward for the prize; having entered the year before without success, he completely reworked it before trying again. 

That reworking is what sets Ilustrado apart.  Syjuco's first version was a straight-forward, chronological story told by one narrator.     After this failed to make the longlist, he dismantled the whole thing and reassembled it in a brilliant cacophonous mash up of different voices, mediums and narrational styles.  The title refers to a class of eighteenth century colonial Philippines, the 'enlightened ones', who were educated in Spanish and travelled widely through Europe, returning to the homeland with new ideas of social and political reform.  Ilustrado follows the story of a young writer, named Miguel Syjuco, who is working on a biography of his recently deceased mentor, the famous Filipino writer Crispin Salvador.  Salvador dies in New York in mysterious circumstances leaving a dense swirl of rumours and possibly, somewhere, the unpublished pages of his fabled magnum opus, The Bridges Ablaze.

The story is narrated by the Syjuco character, and liberally interspersed with extracts from Salvador's books, fragments of a fictional Paris Review interview, blog entries, emails and newspaper articles. Footnotes credit a spectrum of sources, from the Guardian to the Paris Review, and the effect is so convincing that many readers have failed to realise that Salvador is an invented character and not a real author that Syjuco has appropriated for his novel.  One agent told Syjuco that thought they loved the book, they couldn't possibly get permission to reproduce so much of Salvador's work.  Another Amazon reviewer complained that most of the book was written by Salvador.  Occasionally a second, omnipotent narrator pops up, presumably Miguel Syjuco the author, always one step ahead of Miguel Syjuco the character.  Confused?  Don't be.  It works. 

Syjuco chose to share his name with his main character in order, he explains, to wrong-foot his readers because "when you're off-balance, you're engaged."  He says the Syjuco character is not him, but it's a risky bluff given the sheer number of parallels between them.  Both Miguels are Filipino, were bought up in Canada before returning to Manila.  Both attended college in New York and are working towards a literary life.  Both are from political families, are politically engaged and critical of the political system back home.  Surely...? "No," he insists, "this is not me, This is a work of fiction."  Or, another way of looking at it, "Every character in this book is me, or what I'd like to be, or what I don't want to be." 

The Syjucos left Manila in 1977, when Miguel was a one year-old, and settled in Vancouver, where he attended school.  When he was eleven, his father returned to politics, (he was a player in the Aroyo administration) and moved the family back home.  The young Syjuco found this understandably unsettling.  "Although I'd always thought of myself as Filipino in Canada, it was a big culture shock, especially at that age, you know, puberty.   It's an awkward age to suddenly be brought from the place you know to a place of totally different culture."  

As members of the political class, the family held a very particular position in Manila society.  "You live in a gated community and you drive around in   your car with tinted windows; there is that remove." Syjuco did, however get to see another side of life that his wealthy high school peers perhaps did not.   "I was blessed that my father was in politics.  Every election season I would accompany him on the campaign trail, so I encountered the real rural and urban poor and I saw first hand that things aren't as they should be.  I think that was a real blessing, to have been given that perspective." 

He is at all times scrupulously respectful when speaking directly of his father, but his own politics have veered leftwards, and there are hints of tension.  There was a familial expectation that he would follow his father in to politics, but "Philippine politics is very difficult.  It's a world of compromise and shifting allegiances and dirty games, and I knew that it would corrupt me or it would ruin me or it would kill me, and I didn't want any of those things."    When I ask how his decision to write instead went down with his family, Syjuco hesitates for the first time.  "Um... I don't know if my dad's read it.  He and I have very different politics. I respect what he does very, very much, and I owe him so much, but, you know, I'm young and idealistic, and he's pragmatic, and maybe a little bit more conservative, and more aware of the realities of the Philippines' political arena.  But I think you need both.  You need those opposing forces, even if they're contradicting.  And you know, I'm willing to listen and try to understand what he does and what he says and I think he will be too." 

Syjuco describes Ilustrado as 'a love letter to the Philippines.' "It's at times satirical and deeply critical, but you're always most critical of the things you love."  The book is especially reproachful of the political elite, satirising their vanity, corruption and arrogance.  Was he concerned that that people back home would interpret the book as a direct criticism levelled at them by him personally?  "There's nothing wrong, I think,  with provoking people into thinking things though a little bit more, wondering, even reacting.  We're not a very reactive society in the Philippines.  In fact, societies by and large don't like to react to things, and writing should provoke people out of that inertia." 

Syjuco has returned to live in Canada, but remains actively engaged with the state of affairs in the Philippines.  "Somewhere along the line it occurred to me that writing could be part of the political discourse.  I don't have the stomach, I don't have the constitution to be in the political arena - actively -  so being a political commentator in my own way is something that suits me and allows me to do something, I hope."

People seem to expect a lot of him.  At his book launch the previous evening, he is not simply questioned on everything from corruption to child poverty in the Philippines, but expected to provide solutions.   "I'm being asked all of these hard questions, and that's astonishing to me, and frightening," he admits.  "I've written this book and now I'm being asked to comment on the BBC about the Philippine elections, or write an op-ed piece for the International Herald Tribune and I'm scared to comment, because there are people who know more about this than I do."  He's happy to be part of the discussion, he says, so long as he's not expected to have all the answers.  He shrugs.  "Life is stepping up to the plate when you don't feel prepared and then in doing so you become prepared.  You discover you have something to say.  But at the end of the day, when I'm done working, I like to sit on my couch and play my Playstation and smoke my bong, you know, I'm just a regular guy.  I'm a flawed, lost, young, indulgent human being," he finishes, laughing.  I just can't imagine him in a t-shirt.

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Ilustrado is published by Picador.

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Wednesday

Today is the first day where I can relax a little. The last two days have been busy and strange. Monday I was invited to a literary party by Garrison Keillor at the Tribeca rooftop in NYC. Me and my editor were the only men not wearing a suit or tuxedo. Garrison Keillor said hello and told me "thanks for wearing a tie." We ate fancy meals and Garrison Keillor didn't speak much at the table but his wife did. His editor offered me and my wife to stay in her Brooklyn apartment during a summer vacation she is taking. That was very nice. Garrison Keillor gave a brilliantly dark speech that made people feel so uncomfortable they had to laugh. The next morning I took a train back to Albany (7am departure after sleeping 3-4 hours) and went to my day job for the day. I answered phone calls, blasted off emails, and tried to stay awake with coffee. It was one of the busiest days of the year. And now it's Wednesday and things are a little slower. It's hot and I'm not writing or reading.

Thursday

Tuesday was the official release date of my novel Light Boxes, but it didn't really feel like anything. There wasn't any big party or grand ceremony with a cake. I was at work until 8:00 and went to bed two hours later. Some people said nice things on Facebook. But today was my first reading to support the book. The reading was in Albany and almost everyone that showed up was a family member, close friend, or day job co-worker. If they didn't show up, maybe 4 people would have been there. I had fun. It was like reading at a family reunion, or birthday party. After the reading I sat on the couch with my wife and watched television before falling asleep.

Friday

I'm taking my co-workers out for lunch today. It's beautiful outside and I want to sit outside eating Mexican food. I've been doing more thinking about writing than actual writing. I've been checking my Amazon sales ranking and I know it's an insanely silly thing to do. I just stopped typing this to check my Amazon sales ranking. It says #12,101 which doesn't really mean anything. Yesterday it was #55,000. I'm sitting here drinking coffee. I've been thinking about Borges a lot. I've been thinking about the upcoming World Cup which is one of the most beautiful and exciting events. I just checked some Amazon sales rankings for Borges. It's early, so I might write more for this entry.... (Morning update: didn't add anything to this day).

Saturday

Today is a three day weekend here in the US and I plan to do very little which means the next few entries will be pretty embarrassing. It's been a pretty strange week and today I'm going to sit and read and maybe write a little. It's sunny and warm outside. Me and my wife have been watching LOST. We need to go grocery shopping. It's a lazy day and it feels good.

Sunday

This morning I did an interview with Dazed Digital. I rambled a lot - something I'm guilty of doing when asked questions that could probably be answered with Yes or No. After the interview, me and Melanie went shopping and then to her parent's house for dinner. We ate hamburgers and hotdogs and salad. I thought a lot about the book I'm working on, which is what I've been doing for months - just thinking and not writing. The weekend is what I imagined - relaxing/being lazy. After we get back from Melanie's parents house I sit in the backyard and read for a while.

Monday

Today we went to a birthday party for a three year old. The three year olds mother, Erin, is a good friend and was recently in a bicycle accident. I'm not sure how she hosted a party, she could hardly stand. The theme of the party was princess and king. I was the king of plaid. There was a little boy named Henry who was a true terror. He shot me with a water gun, laughed, and ran away. Oh, Henry. After the party me and Melanie went home. I tried to start a fire with some kind of organic charcoal, but it didn't work. I read for a little while and we watched LOST. I thought more about writing. I've pretty much fallen into a trap of fear about writing. This happens to me. I spent a whole year just thinking about writing. But it's so easy, you just sit down and type some words.

Tuesday

Back to work! I think sometimes people are surprised I have a full-time office job. I'm not sure why. How do writers make money? I doubt many make enough to live on from book advances and sales. Some do. Today I will sit at my office job and answer emails and phone calls and be a business man. I'm currently wearing a pink shirt and tie. Looking back at the last week it feels pretty uneventful. Or maybe I feel like I'm going to come off as extremely lazy. I feel like most of my time is spent either at work or sitting at home - spending time with Melanie and cats. I want a simple life and tend to push away drama. So I'm sitting here just thinking and daydreaming and there is probably a lot going on in the world right now.

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Light Boxes is published by Hamish Hamilton.

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            To be fair, I think this is not only a familiar question but a serious one.  I have a hunch that the current expression of this concern arises from a feeling of worried urgency, if not actual panic.  Life is too short, we fear, or too uncertain, to engage in such indirect exercises.  And I think it's reasonable, these days, to think this way.  Having just read (or rather, having deep-skimmed before passing it wordlessly to the wife) Bill McKibben's terrifying Eaarth, I too wonder whether it's a wise idea to spend even one more minute reading yet another narrative novel, in which imaginary people are set in motion doing imaginary things.  Reading this kind of fiction can seem a criminally frivolous pastime given the level of crisis that is obvious everywhere.  If, as McKibben tells us, atmospheric CO2 counts are soon to be double the level that can sustain civilization, surely that's the more important matter.  Surely if we're going to be reading imaginary stories at all we should be reading novels only for a brief, hard-earned escape or for their utility value - for practical information about the operation of the human animal, I suppose - rather than for the sort of content narrative novels are uniquely good at delivering - which is something like the representation, through the mechanism of story, of the ineffable workings of the human mindscape.  In a time of justifiable panic, this intricate, culturally-determined practice may be considered a most incidental art.  And art, of course, rarely survives the survivalists. 

As it happens, I write from - and live in - a position of half-confirmed despair.  I worry humanity is close to having run its course.  We seem to be lousy creatures from at least a moral standpoint if not a biological one.  Much as I'd prefer not to think so, it does appear that as a species we're more bad news (for ourselves and for our planet) than good.  The obvious and thrilling ingenuity and loveliness of certain of us often appears to be outweighed by the stupidity, willful ignorance, short-sightedness, cruelty, and laziness of all the rest of us.  Ruling out alien intervention or some spectacular technological surge, it seems evident our species will not survive in the long term at the levels we're now living, and if it seems unlikely (and even unfair) to imagine oneself living at the peak of any civilization about to collapse, we can remind ourselves that most individuals in a civilization will live at its peak because that's just the point at which it can sustain the largest number of individuals.  If, as it increasingly appears, we are doomed, we're doomed because we're a beast whose unusual powers and influences, in becoming delocalized, have become disastrous.  One would not be ill-advised to begin looking for arable land for sale in the interior, away from rising sea levels, with a reliable groundwater source, and I happen to know of three places within five miles of my desk where I can learn to shoot a gun.  Surely fifty years from now the last thing on my mind (assuming I still have one) will be the convincing rendering of an imaginary human via the medium of words on a page. 

            So I am no stranger to despair.

            On the other hand it might also be argued, notwithstanding our current circumstances, that a certain existential-grade despair is all too familiar to any serious novelist.  Why am I doing this? is a cry every novelist will issue at some point during the otherwise workmanlike wattling-and-daubing of a novel.  Why am I trying to make imaginary people produce meaning? we ask ourselves, sighing our heads forward onto the keyboard.  No matter how practiced we are, it can seem damnedly difficult to make people's stories add up to anything important.  This truth is made agonizingly more plain by the interesting discovery that the mere act of writing, after a certain level of competence is reached, is not the problem.  Writer's block is, for the most part, a myth perpetrated by the lazy and bought into by those driven by psychology to self-destruction.  Just writing is cussedly simple.  (Look at how many people do it.)  Writing decently isn't much harder.  Plotting is often a cold-blooded exercise.  A competent writer can, with a minimum of pain, arrange the levers and pulleys that compose a sturdy (or a suitably unsturdy) storyline.  A descriptive passage can be reduced to a formula that goes: thing + thing + thing = a character feeling something that is a mental derivative of these elements and that advances the character and plot by some increment.  Dialog can be subjected to the scrutiny of what we might call the "visual ear," i.e., what something looks like it sounds (which is often different from how it actually sounds out loud).  Even the construction of convincing characters can be accomplished with the assignment of a certain twist of thought, a peculiarity of voice, a useful history, a plausible tendency to do the thing one would not usually be expected to do...these are all straightforward reifying measures, and to one degree or another they are the old tricks we (weary and a little shamefaced) pass on in writing program classrooms.  The problem may arise when we attempt to force these capably engineered parts to produce something beyond themselves, some kind of "meaning," which we hope may reward the effort of the reader of serious fiction - a reader who, given his many other pressing concerns, may be on the hunt for something concrete and useful to take away from whatever he reads. 

            But I think this is a mistaken way of proceeding.  The deepest purpose of any fiction, any novel, is to be found not in its content - not revealed at some epiphanic conclusion, not thematically embedded in the narrative machinery in some encoded fashion -- but in the form of the work itself.  The deepest purpose of the traditional narrative novel is its reasonably faithful depiction of imaginary people doing imaginary things.  That's the unfashionable reason most people read, after all - to follow along with some imaginary people as they go about their invented lives.  And why?  Because - happily for the future of our species - the human animal possesses, along with its fierce drive for self-preservation, a helplessly biological tendency to empathize with others of its species, even when those others are imaginary beings.  We should take some comfort from the fact that this is why most people read, in fact - not to discover some kind of useful meaning but to observe, at the ideally illuminative distance that fiction offers, and with the help of the superlatively able guide to human nature that an author ought to be, the ways people actually behave - how they sweep the floor, think about their children, want something and get it or don't.  We enjoy, as a species, this kind of empathetic work, and we enjoy it because it comes naturally to us.  We're one of the few species on the planet (along with certain whales and apes) to feature mirror neurons in our brains - cells whose function is to help us comprehend what other members of our species are doing and why.  We have evolved not only to look out for ourselves, but to wonder why other people are doing the things they're doing.  We can't help it.  It's what we do.  Do we often use this skill to manipulate others, or to create an advantage for ourselves?  Of course.  But this fact of our biology is also at the root of every act of empathy and every stroke of unlikely altruism.  And if we have to wonder whether altruism is really all that important to us as a species, think of what we mean by "hero" - someone who risks his life to save someone else.  Or think of the central story of western culture -- a story of self-sacrifice in service of the greater good.  The empathic instinct is permanently rooted in our understanding of what it means to be fully human - which is why, when we read about people doing recognizably human things, our instinct to identify with other people moves us to feel this experience as meaningful, even if there's no concrete "takeaway" - nothing as clumsily useful or concrete as a lesson we might point to.  It's why good literary novels strike most of us as fundamentally more sustaining than dumb potboilers.

            And this is why I think the kinds of stories we need the most now are the ones that bring us most completely into the minds of people as they go about their daily, apparently unmeaningful lives.  We need stories that maximally activate our compassionate instincts.  As I see it, serious narrative novels are among the very few artifacts that can effect a net increase in the amount of empathy in the culture.  Narrative novels offer an opportunity to be concerned about other humans whom it is impossible to manipulate or from whom it is impossible to gain any advantage.   In the pages of a narrative novel, we can practice the vanishing art of giving an unselfish damn.  If the attraction of such art is continues to wane, we may be in more trouble than we know.  After all, the urge to buy safe acres in Kentucky is a profoundly unempathetic urge.  It's the get me out of here urge.  It's the we're on our own urge.  However justified it may be, it's the urge that's going to doom us just as surely as elevated levels of atmospheric carbon will.  Because our problems are too big, as we now understand, to fix on an individual basis.  If we're going to survive, it'll have to be a group effort. 

In the six years of writing The Unfixed Stars, about the unlikely discovery of Pluto in 1930 by the farmboy Clyde Tombaugh, I had plenty of occasions, and indeed plenty of the novelist's usual reasons, to despair.  I wanted to tell the novel from multiple points of view, from various places around the country, and the narrative stitching was laborious.  Recreating the late 1920s was an effort.  The many novels and diaries that I used as source material were in their own ways sustaining, in that they opened surprising vistas of a certain human continuity.  Before writing The Unfixed Stars, I had no idea Ring Lardner had his Mozartian ear for comic timing, or that John O'Hara was such a gleefully sad bastard.  Clyde Tombaugh's own remarkable story, and the tales of the astronomical weirdos and strivers who surrounded him, were instructive.   But the books that bolstered me during the predictable periods of writerly despair weren't novels about astronomy, or historical-novels-told-from-multiple-points-of-view, but books that demonstrated the worthwhileness of the narrative project itself and did so by depicting imaginary people as closely and as faithfully as the form allowed.  There were many of these, but the books I took most solace from tended to be those whose protagonists resembled not only certain humans I know (or am) but also resembled in some nontrivial fashion the human species as a whole: striving, stupid, hapless, and full of occasional sweet glory - in sum, people who seemed so comprehensively real my biology insisted I care about them.  These characters lived in William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf, Alice Munro's Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, Louis Begley's About Schmidt, and Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road (among many others).  Jim Dixon, Albert Schmidt, Limey Peters, Alfrida, April and Frank Wheeler, all offered themselves as damaged and sometimes exasperating figures who, in their ferocious flawed reality, demanded my interest.  During the writing of The Unfixed Stars, I thought I was turning to these reliable volumes for some echo of prose that would be clarifying or otherwise helpful.  In fact, I was turning to them because they offered solutions to the problem of despair.  Yes, these books propose, the human animal is a desperate, pathetic creature who we might wisely want nothing to do with.  And yes, they further propose, he is worth our effort, because our inborn instinct to care about other people finally overcomes our urge to save ourselves alone.  

            And of course there is no saving oneself alone any longer.  In order to save ourselves, we have to save everyone.  If we're to go on, if we're to survive, we have to start by insisting on this optimistic proposition, as difficult - and indeed as risky - as it might be.

After I finished my life of Wodehouse in 2004 I decided I would take a self-imposed break from reading his work. Recently, commissioned to write an introduction to a PGW anthology, I've come out of purdah. And what a delight it has been! Joy in the Morning is possibly PGWs masterpiece: it's a Jeeves and Wooster novel set in the country home, Steeple Bumpleigh, of Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha. As well as its joyously madcap plot (perfectly narrated as usual) the novel contains some of Wodehouse's best lines. My favourite is "He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat's milk." Genius.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I was first introduced to this great novel in an abridged version at school, and was utterly intimidated by it. Now, having found several friends reading it on the sly, I have been tempted to immerse myself in the real thing. It's an extraordinary experience: operatic in its range of emotions, Biblical in its intensity and profoundly American in the urgency of its quest for a resolution to troubling experience. Some of it is, I'm surprised to find, very funny. And the character of Captain Ahab is one of American literature's towering creations. Hemingway used to say that all US writing came from Twain. In a modern sense, all the most interesting contemporary American prose comes from Melville.

The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson

Waiting for a book to come out, as I am at the moment with Globish, one is slightly distracted. I found this life of Fleming in a second hand bookshop. It's an early life, and has the flaws of the first life, but Pearson knows his subject well and writes economically about the extraordinary childhood and wartime career of the man who invented 007.

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Globish; How the English Language Became the World's Language is published by Penguin.

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Joe Meno the writer and Joe Meno the man are like first cousins; clearly related and in many ways most similar, but not quite the same thing.  My expectations may have played a part in this, of course.  He is a new name here, but has already met comparisons with Jonathan Franzen.  The Chicago native is only 36 but has a long bibliography behind him.  On the page he is masterfully assured; in person he is sweetly modest, with the air of a young history teacher.   He interviews like a seasoned pro, but is generous and politely deferent in conversation, and completely free of arrogance.  He used to drive a flower delivery van, which somehow says everything about his character, but nothing at all about his writing.

This is the first time he has been published in the UK, and the second time he's toured his book The Great Perhaps.  He's also working on the screenplay with The Blind Side producer Gil Netter, so having put down his pen two years ago, he's now up to his nose in it again.  Far from being weary of having to revisit old ground, he seems genuinely pleased.  "It's actually this great experience.  It's a chance to go back and remind yourself of what you liked about the book or why you wrote the book."  The idea of a film is tantalising; the story has affinities with the 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, and would translate perfectly onto screen.

The Great Perhaps follows the Caspar Family as it struggles to find its axis.   Jonathan is a palaeontologist in search of an elusive giant prehistoric squid.  His wife Madeline is an animal behaviourist studying a pigeon micro-society that seems to be descending into violence.  Their eldest daughter Amelia is a self-styled communist and scourge of the school newspaper, while their younger, Thisbe, has recently found God.  Jonathan is a weak man and a hopeless patriarch.  His influence as a father and husband is defined by his absence, and without a lynchpin his family is free to unravel.  Each of the Caspers inhabits their own separate sphere, ghosts to one another in the struggle to understand themselves.  And there is plenty to understand; they are beset by quirks and idiocracies, which is reflected in the text itself: whole chapters are given over to alphabetical lists, episodes of a 1940s radio series are interspersed; letters and telegrams are transcribed; and diagrams of animals and clouds abut the text.

Thisbe and Amelia are the stars of the book.  As Jonathan and Madeline's relationship breaks down, each of them retreats in to the solace and simplicity of radicalism.  Their rebellions are both extreme, and extremely normal; noise and distraction from the tortures of teen-age.  Thisbe's ardent faith sees her rounding up the neighbourhood cats in order to convert them to the saving grace of Jesus, and muttering in ostentatious prayer on family car trips.  'Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle please.  If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumour.  Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the back seat and my older sister be totally covered in blood.' Meanwhile, Amelia stalks the school corridors in a black beret, a solitary soldier in the war against capitalism.  Meno has a brilliant ear for the argot of teenage girls.  I assume this is thanks to time spent teaching - he teaches fiction at Colombia College in Chicago - but in fact, he laughs, "being a fiction writer, is pretty close to being like a teenage girl. You're alone in your room and you have these great one sided conversations with yourself."  Whatever the case, he captures perfectly the strange sing-song cadences, the twisted logic and the manifold anxieties of the girls' adolescence. 

Set in the run up to the 2004 US presidential election, The Great Perhaps is a surprisingly angry book.  Meno's considered response to the Bush election and the war on terror goes some way to temper the whimsy of the Caspers, whose turmoil is both a reflection of and a response to the increasing unreliability of those in power and the politics of fear that was used to finagle policy in the wake of September 11^th.  At the time Meno was working for an American magazine with a political bent, and was engaged throughout the campaign working against the incumbent administration. Bush's re-election had a profound effect on him.  "In my adult life I had never been involved in political action, or as horribly disappointed by the results.  It never had mattered that much to me.  But now I felt deeply distraught," he remembers. "It was the first time I felt really embarrassed being American."

 "A book comes out of some question you have about life, or about the world," he suggests, and the 2004 election and its aftermath provoked a whole knot of questions about how we are motivated - or repressed - by fear, and the exploitation of our personal anxieties for political ends.  Was it something that occurred after the attack on the twin towers, or something people have been facing for centuries?  "I started experimenting with that idea.  What the Caspers are really afraid of is not just uncertainty, but complexity.  They all want some simple answer in their life."   Each is struggling with complicated questions and trying to arrive at simple answers.  By the end of the book, they have all, to some degree, learned to live with their uncertainty and come to understand that complication is a condition of life, not a puzzle to be solved.  "The book became an argument on behalf of the idea of complexity, why we need complex answers.  That came out of my understanding of the war in Iraq, and with why I thought President Bush was re-elected.  He's very good at giving these simple short answers, while his opponent, John Kerry gave these long, complicated, rambling answers, and I think when people are afraid they most want that simplicity, they want some simple answer to give them comfort."

There is at times a disparity between the cutenesses and contrivances of the characters, and Meno's intelligent, logical reasoning for them.  On the page, the story can buckle under its own whimsy.  There is the danger that each of the Caspers becomes reduced down to a set of symptoms and their very singular manifestations, such as Jonathan's debilitating phobia of clouds which causes him to fit and faint at the sight of them, and  Madeline beguilement by the figure of a man-shaped cloud which she starts to follow in her Volvo on cross-county journeys to wherever it leads.  Meno's argument for whimsy reaches back to the traditions of commedia dell arte via Beckett, Pirandello and the Surrealist movement, and lends credence and seriousness of purpose to his experiments on the page.  But of course, a discussion with the author does not come with the purchase of every book, and one is left with a slight craving for a little less sugar and a little more salt.

The Great Perhaps is Meno's fifth novel and his seventh book.  His experience is evident in the remarkable assuredness of the writing and his deft ventriloquism.  There is a confidence and strength of voice that most writers arrive at only much later.  The Great Perhaps certainly marks a departure from his previous books, as much as a progression.  It's darker, more complex and in the main more than meets its own ambition.  "I can't even go back and look at my first couple of books.  There's that feeling that the first things you write are like these bad photographs of you from high school where you're dressed up like Robert Smith or something.  You're like, 'What was I thinking?' he laughs, wincing.  It's a good thing, surely?  He agrees:  "To me that's part of the process and that's what's really interesting about writing: in order to do anything interesting you have to do some really bad things.  To write one good story you're going to write ten really bad stories, it's how you grow." 

In this respect, he's lucky.  His publishing career has allowed him to develop as a writer and find his voice over the course of a few books.  There is a burden of expectation on writers, particularly in this country, and particularly as margins are squeezed ever tighter, to produce a perfect first novel and earn the right to a second according to how many books they sell.  Publishers no longer have the luxury of investing in a writer's long-term career.  "What a lot of publishers are looking for now is a hit," he agrees.  "It's a mistake; they can pick the perfect cover, and they can have the best editor and a great marketing plan and tour, and a lot of the times good books don't get noticed right away."  Meno's career to date is a perfect argument for a more farsighted approach to publishing and the patronage of writers, economically anachronistic though it may be.  I can't help but feel that, in this case, it's going to pay dividends.     

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Unreliable Sources: How the 20th Century was Reported is published by Pan.

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In my hut in my back garden in West Cork.

Where do you write?

Here, at my desk; in my notebook, in an armchair; on planes.

How do you write?

By recording in words the scenes that are workshopped and staged in my imagination.

What keeps you writing?

My addiction to it.

Who do you write for?

Me, and the rest of the world.  Nobody else.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?

My wife, and certain old friends.

How do you know if your work is good?

If my wife hands my MS back after a few hours, it's good.

If it languishes on the bedside table for days, it's a dog.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

Ten or twenty, in varying degrees of completion.

Which book do you wish you'd written?

I esteem many, but I can't make 'wish' bridge the gap of the fact that I didn't write them and couldn't have done so.  A book is an outgrowth of a personality, and unless you can be someone else, you couldn't write that person's work.  Why would you want to when it's tough enough writing your own.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?

Life's too short for literary guilt.  Go ahead, go on, nobody'll ever find out, go on, read it, you know you want to...

Which writer made you want to write?

Ursula le Guin's Earthsea, Isaac Asimov's Foundation books and John Wyndham's The Chrysalids.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?

This time my problem is with 'most': how do I measure James Ellroy's against Marilynne Robinson?  Kazuo Ishiguro against Neil Gaiman?  Compelling and original and tightly-composed narrative excites me, whoever wrote it.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?

Dozing on the sunlit sofa in the corner of the room.

Oh, you mean my job?  Not sure.  Designing video games?

What next?

Global dominance by anti-democratic states followed by modernity dropping out of the sky as its oil tanks all run dry at once.  But don't panic.

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is published by Sceptre

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But for a writer so bold and insightful in giving motives and ruminations to her male characters, it's a curious choice. Male novelists had never been shy of imagining all-female conversations. Defoe didn't hesitate to write the racy confessions of Moll Flanders who was, among other things "Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother)". Samuel Richardson happily invented Clarissa's letters to her female friends.

When embarking on my own novel, The Lessons, narrated by an Oxford student, James Stieff, and partly occupied with his relationship with another man, Mark Winters, I took heart from the flowering, over the past 50 years, of novels written by women very much from the male perspective. I hadn't intended to write the novel from a man's perspective at first. The scene which was the seed of the book was written from a woman's point of view, but something about it didn't work. I tried changing some details. Still didn't work. I put it away for a while and when I found it again in a year-old notebook I thought "oh, of course. The narrator is a man."

It is an exciting transformation to write from the perspective of the other sex. There is something delicious, almost erotic, about donning the imaginary persona of a man to write. It feels illicit, like walking accidentally-on-purpose into the wrong changing room, or intimate, like putting on a boyfriend's cologne.

This sense of the forbidden, shameful and yet glorious transformation is everywhere in Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr Ripley. Tom Ripley, an amoral chancer, is sent to Italy by the wealthy parents of Dickie Greenleaf, in order to try to persuade Dickie to come home. Tom fails at this task, if he had ever intended to fulfil it at all, but becomes obsessed by the handsome, patrician Dickie. Eventually, forced - as he sees it - by necessity, Tom gets rid of Dickie and takes his place completely, pretending to be him.

"His very expression, Tom thought, was like Dickie's now. He wore a smile that was dangerously welcoming... It was Dickie's best and most typical smile when he was in a good humour. Tom was in a good humour. It was Paris. Wonderful to sit in a famous café, and to think of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow being Dickie Greenleaf! The cuff links, the white silk shirts... the old mustard-coloured coat sweater with the sagging pockets, they were all his and he loved them all."

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is, of course, the petty pace lamented by Shakespeare's great usurper of another man's place: Macbeth. Is it too much to imagine Tom Ripley taking on a little of Highsmith's own delight at wearing the fictional suit of a man?

The writer Louise Welsh's three novels have all had a male protagonist. Her second, Tamburlaine Must Die, an atmospheric take on the mystery of Christopher Marlowe's death in Deptford in 1593, is narrated by Marlowe himself with crisp confidence. At the very start of the novel she has Marlowe sum himself up thus:

"I am of an adventurous nature. I have often invited danger and have even goaded men to violence for the sake of excitement. I like best what lies beyond my reach and admit to using friendship, State and Church to my own ends. I acknowledge breaking God's law and man's with few regrets."

The self-assurance and the wry acceptance of this passage seemed to me to ring true both for a man of this time and, specifically, for Marlowe. For a modern woman, it would perhaps be more difficult, even intolerable, to imagine oneself as a 16^th century woman - with all the strictures and perhaps the acceptance of subservience that might imply - than a man. The fear, though, is that however hard one tries the male voice might not ring true. Welsh's Marlowe seems to me utterly convincing; I'm not a man, but it persuaded male reviewers too.

In my own work, my senses were sharpened to false gender notes by my experience judging a short story prize a few years ago. We were given a list of the authors and the titles of their stories, but it was possible to read the stories without looking at that list. I found it quite easy to pick out, from the anonymous stories, three which had clearly been written by men, in a woman's voice. The tip off in all three cases was: extraneous breasts. The story would be proceeding quite normally, narrated by this fictional woman until, suddenly, breasts were mentioned for no obvious reason. "I took a bath, washing myself carefully, including my breasts." "The dress fitted perfectly, even over my breasts." That sort of thing. Perhaps Portnoy's Complaint would suggest otherwise, but I decided, in my own work, to try to steer clear of extraneous penises.

Rose Tremain's work has dealt with difficult gender distinctions, notably in Sacred Country, which tells the story of a girl convinced she should have been born a boy and The Way I Found Her, a haunting novel in which a teenage boy becomes obsessed with an older woman. One of her best-loved novels, Restoration is narrated by a man serving at the court of King Charles II, Robert Merivel. Tremain's description of a sexual encounter from Merivel's perspective makes it clear that the transaction is as much about power - a genderless quality - as about physical acts.

"I celebrated by visiting Mrs Pierpoint, getting drunk with her at the Leg Tavern and tumbling her in a muddy ditch on Hampstead Fields. Afterwards, she had the temerity to ask me whether, now that I was in the King's employ, I could get some position at Court for the uncouth Mr Pierpoint... I learned at once a lesson I never let myself forget: that power and success carry in their train a clamouring queue of greasers and supplicants."

This is the point, of course. Most qualities are genderless. Love has no gender, nor does desire, passion, greed, anger, hatred or joy. Bodies aside, men and women aren't so different, and it's this which enables us to don each other's fictional skin with relative ease.

Elizabeth Knox's beautiful and moving novel, The Vintner's Luck, traces the story of a 19^th century wine-maker's relationship with a male angel. The vintner, Sobran, loses his eight year old daughter Nicolette to a fever, and the angel, Xas, comforts him:

"Xas held Sobran all night, lying against the slope, on the raft of his wings.... Sobran's friends brought him brandy or laid their arms along his shoulders - but no one wrapped their body about his and bore him away. The angel was strong and tender and as fresh as a young river. The angel wasn't tentative or impatient. For hours through tears and the painful intimacy of mourning the angel held him. Sobran's grief lost its edge against Xas's body."

The poignant sensuality of this scene would have had a slightly different resonance played between a man and a woman, or between two women. But the emotions in it would have been the same, the intensity of touch as meaningful. The sense I take from it is that our bodies are physical and human first and foremost, and only gendered second.

When I'm asked, as I occasionally have been, why I chose to write The Lessons from a male perspective, I give roughly the same answer as I gave to the question of why I, a straight woman, chose to write my first novel about the lesbian relationship between two women. Broadly, it is because I am a feminist. Or perhaps a better phrase, though more of a mouthful, is "gender equalitarian". I do not believe that heterosexual love, passion, desire, betrayal are so very different to homosexual love, passion, desire and betrayal that they are mutually incomprehensible. I do not believe that men and women are so radically different that we cannot understand one another.

Novels are the triumph of empathy and hope over biology. Unlike Tiresias - the figure of Greek legend who spent part of life as a man and part as a woman - none of us can flick between genders at will. But via novels, we can enter into the minds of people who are different from us in all sorts of superficial ways and, looking out through their eyes, understand that the differences will never be as great as the similarities.

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The Lessons is published by Viking.

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Thursday

I wait at the bus-stop, next to the recycling bins. It's late March, and it should be warm in Barcelona by now, but there's a low grey sky and a scouring wind. I'm wearing five layers of clothing. Every day I take the bus up into the hills at the back of the city. I rent a small room on the ground floor of a dilapidated convent. The room backs on to bare rock, and there's no central heating, so it can be pretty damp in the winter. I have to keep my radiator on twenty-four hours a day, otherwise my books start to crinkle like those Viennetta cakes that were so fashionable in the seventies. 

My bus arrives, with Jesus behind the wheel.  I'm on first name terms with both the bus drivers - Jesus in the morning, Francisco in the afternoon. Jesus asks me what I'm doing for Easter. I have to go to London, I tell him.  I've got a new book coming out.  And then I say, I don't really do Easter. This makes Jesus chuckle.  

Friday

All yesterday's clouds have gone. There's a bright blue sky, and the breeze has an edge of iron to it, a hint of snow. Sometimes you can smell the Pyrenees, even though they're two hours' drive away. I hang the washing out on our terrace.  The light is so clear that the surrounding rooftops seem outlined in black.  Two green parrots flash between the buildings.  

At ten o'clock, when my wife returns from taking our daughter to school, we go and sit in the café by the church. Pollen from the plane trees drifts in clumps across the smooth paved square. In four months' time we will no longer be here.  I'm trying not to think about that.   

As I wait at the bus-stop, I realise my ticket is used up. The bus arrives. I tell Jesus that my T-10 has expired and start searching my pockets for change. Jesus waves my money away. Don't worry about it, he says.  

Saturday

It's my turn to clean the common parts of our apartment building, a chore that comes round every five weeks or so. I clean the mirror and the window in the lift, and the glass in the front doors of the building, then I sweep and mop the lobby, and the stretch of pavement just outside the building.  I start at eight in the morning, just after I get up. In Barcelona, people seem to love to see you cleaning - they nod approvingly as they walk by - and I feel oddly useful and worthwhile for the hour it takes.

Later, on my way to work, I notice that a door which is usually padlocked is standing open. The property stands on a fork in the road, so the garden is a triangle, with a view of the city beyond, and the sea in the distance, a deep dark purple-blue. I look inside. There's a small house, with green shutters and a low tiled roof.  In the garden, which is a tangle of undergrowth, there are empty wine-carafes, and women's shoes, and cactuses in paint-pots. There's a ceramic table with a light above it, the lampshade a metal skeleton, the bulb long gone. 

Out on the street again, I run into an old lady who lives nearby. She's wearing a turquoise dressing-gown and red slippers, and she's carrying newspapers for recycling.  This whole area used to be like that, she says, looking over my shoulder. There weren't even proper roads, just tracks. Now there are new buildings going up every day. Cranes everywhere.    

Sunday

A bag of cement fell off the back of a lorry in the night outside our building, and the narrow street is an inch deep in pale dust, like the surface of the moon.

On Sundays I leave the house early. I work from eight until midday.  I love working on Sunday mornings. It's so quiet - especially now, just before holy week. It reminds me of August, when Barcelona empties out, and the area where I live - Sarria - is utterly deserted, like the beginning of the film, 'Open Your Eyes'. 

At eleven, the bell begins to ring outside the chapel on the third floor. It rings perhaps one hundred times, with three deliberate rings, like punctuation, at the end. This happens again at a quarter past eleven, and then again at half past.  People climb the brick stairs past my window.  Later, just before midday, I hear the congregation singing up above, and as always, when I hear them singing,  I seem to be writing something highly inappropriate - in this case, a man cutting a woman's pubic hair. 

Just before leaving work, at one o'clock, I hear the eerie piped notes of the man who sharpens knives. He drives through the streets on a battered Vespa with a grindstone strapped to the back. 

Monday

After lunch, on my way back to my office,  I find a grey plastic elephant in the gutter. It has a piece of coarse string knotted round its neck, like a sort of lead. It looks old and worn, as if it was lost a long time ago. I add the elephant to the small collection of found objects I keep in my office. I already have one half of a rusty pair of scissors,  a brass key, three Pokemon cards,  and a brown plastic water-pistol that appears to have been squashed flat by a car. I've always loved found objects,. They're like little mysteries. The places where stories begin or end. 

At seven o'clock I walk back down the hill.  As I cut through Sarria, near the market, I pass two men and a woman arguing.  I recognise one of the men. He works at the building materials supplier opposite my bus-stop. His hair is like thatch, and he has a lazy eye. The woman is prodding him in the chest, and the other man seems to be trying to intervene. The woman is in her sixties. She's wearing leopard-skin trousers and sunglasses, and has an enormous red shawl draped over her shoulders.

Tuesday

The wind hurtles out of the south west. On the terrace opposite ours, all the plants have blown over.  As I leave our building, I have the feeling I always have - a slight expanding of the heart. I feel good in this city. It's the simple things: the quality of the light, the smile of a shop-keeper, the smell of the air. Such bright sunlight this morning: when I walk into the shadow beneath an underpass, the shadow looks blue.

As we pass the sports centre, Jesus has to brake sharply. Two rubbish bins on wheels have been blown out of position and are blocking the road.  They trundle one way, then the other, and for a moment I see them both as bulls pawing the ground, preparing to charge.

Walking up to my office, I once again pass the abandoned property. The door is still propped open. The wild garden, the sweeping view: this would be a wonderful place to live and work. The euro is too strong against the pound, though, and my earnings have dipped, so we will be leaving Barcelona in the summer, and I don't know if we will ever come back.

On the bus home, I notice that the grey plastic tray where people put their money if they're paying in cash is filled to the brim with fresh mint. I ask Francisco where the mint came from. One of the regular bus-users, he says. An old guy who lives up in the hills. I don't think you know him. That's what I love about living here: the bus-driver with his change-tray stuffed with mint.

Wednesday

As usual on Wednesday I have lunch in Spanish with two architects, Merce and Marie-Eve. I tell them I'm going to be on the cover of a magazine at the weekend. Merce, who is also a photographer, and has just had an exhibition in downtown Barcelona, recently sent me an article about her that appeared in a Spanish paper. Now she reminds me, with a wry smile that she was on page 34. 'Today page 34,' I say optimistically. 'Tomorrow - Page 33,' says Marie-Eve.  

After work, I hurry over to Gerbard, my local bar.  It's the champion's league quarter-final, first leg, and Barcelona are away to Arsenal.  The bar is already buzzing: people smoking and drinking, their eyes lifted to the screen. I squeeze on to a stool at the bar. Nacho reaches for a bottle of Albarino and lifts his eyebrows. I nod.  For the first hour, Barcelona play their trademark one-touch football, so breathtakingly fast and fluent that the whole Arsenal team looks dizzy. Somehow, though, the score ends up being 2 - 2, which isn't a fair reflection of the game at all. Still the two away goals will help us in the second leg. I walk home exhilarated, smelling of wine and smoke.   

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This Party's Got to Stop is published by Granta.

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