On The Guardian: Faber’s CEO Stephen Page discusses the changing role of modern publishers, in light of today’s release of the Apple iPad.

“The iPad’s arrival is unlikely in itself to create a revolution in ebook sales but, like Amazon’s Kindle electronic reader before, it will accelerate the reading universe that’s coming.”

Read Stephen Page’s feature article on guardian.co.uk.

Peter Carey delivered the closing address at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on the theme of media, literacy and democracy. Following the recent publication of his latest novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, he takes on the themes of that book to argue that literacy is essential for a healthy democracy. He advocates a prioritisation of education in order to address the rising tide of political ignorance and its manipulation by politicians around the world. Watch him deliver the speech here.

 

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley’s new novel Private Life traverses the intimate landscape of one woman’s life from the 1880s to World War II.

Its themes were inspired by the life of her great-uncle, the astronomer Thomas See, who was discredited for his controversial theories.

Read the full interview at metro.co.uk.

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Jane Smiley is the critically-acclaimed author of novels including A Thousand Acres,  Horse Heaven and Ten Days in the Hills. Her children’s novel Nobody’s Horse is published in June.

 

On Friday 14 May the Faber archive, based at the company’s new home on Great Russell Street, opened its doors to the public for the very first time, as part of an exclusive competition with Museums at Night and Culture24.

The winners, chosen at random, were Anna Tuckett, Claire King, Helen Cox, Josie Kehoe, Simon Quicke and Victoria Linde – a fantastic group of book lovers and Faber enthusiasts!

Faber’s archivist, Robert Brown began the evening with a virtual tour of Faber’s original office on Russell Square. Along the way, we were introduced to Morgan (the original Faber cat), watched Geoffrey Faber chair a boardroom meeting in a film from 1951, and saw T. S. Eliot’s office in a series of photographs taken on the day he died.

Robert then uncovered key items from the Faber treasure chest, including Eliot’s first letter to a young W. H. Auden, an early drawing of  Old Possum and an amusing postcard sent by Philip Larkin whilst he was on holiday. Amongst the book reports and other Faber riches, Robert told the winners unknown stories from Faber’s history – from fire watching in Bloomsbury during the Blitz to recovering William Golding’s Lord of the Flies from the rejection pile.

Faber New Poets Joe Dunthorne and Heather Phillipson ended the evening with a wonderful poetry reading. Alongside a selection of their own poetry, they read a range of other Faber poets such as Charles Simic, John Berryman, Simon Armitage and Don Paterson.

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Read some of the winner’s blogs:

Foxyhlc | Backwards in Heels | Inside Books

For more information on the Faber archive visit our website and to discover more about Faber’s design history visit the Faber flickr site.

 

Two police officers knock on Laura’s door. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed …

So begins Whatever You Love, the new novel by Louise Doughty (and her first with Faber). Louise is the author five previous novels and one book of non-fiction. She has sat on numerous awards judging panels, and is an in-demand teacher of creative writing.

Whatever You Love is a compelling read – moving and topical, full of grief, lust and retribution – a potent mix. Here’s Louise explaining more to Faber Editor, Sarah Savitt.

‘Whatever You Love’ is set in a small, seaside town with an immigrant population and ethnic tensions – how much of a challenge was it to take on that setting and that social background?

My proudest boast as a novelist is a quote from a review in the Independent, which said of one of my books, ‘Louise Doughty writes about people who don’t normally get written about.’

The town Laura lives in is an out-of-the-way, run-down sort of place with a large community of economic migrants. The man who kills her daughter comes from that community and the battle between them is symptomatic of the ethnic tensions in the town. I was really interested in conjuring a small town torn apart by dramatic events, in the way that a lot of American novelists do really well, when you feel the town is almost like a character in the book. And although a lot has been written about the immigrant experience by writers like Monica Ali or Marina Lewycka, relatively little has been written about the social interaction between migrants and the settled communities they live in.

That said, the background to this book is incidental in that this is very much Laura’s story. It’s really about what one rather ordinary woman finds herself capable of when tragedy is visited upon her.

Laura and David’s relationship is intensely passionate, and your female characters are often frank and liberated about sex and sexuality, in a way that feels modern and even quietly daring. Is this something you’re aware of, or particularly interested in?

Absolutely! It floors me that in this day and age it is still considered controversial or noteworthy when a woman writes frankly about sex. I’ve been getting in trouble for it since my first novel was published in 1995 and suspect that with this book I will be in trouble again.

It was important to me that the flashbacks to when David and Laura first meet were very passionate and very sexual. That was partly because I felt I needed to counterbalance the tragedy of their daughter’s death – you can’t make a book too grim, after all – but also because I was really interested in exploring that strange compulsion you feel for someone when you first fall for them. It’s a form of madness, really. I do think that what we call ‘falling in love’ is often obsessive lust, which then, if you’re lucky, mutates into something calmer and saner and more settled.

I’m very interested in how we all balance the different sorts of love in our lives; sexual passion, married love, the love we feel for our children. Sometimes those sorts of love compete, sometimes they compliment each other. It’s so difficult to write about a couple meeting and falling in love without resorting to cliché – I found putting some interesting and slightly ambiguous sex in really helped …

You have two daughters. Did you find it difficult to imagine and write about the death of a child?

I’m afraid to say that aspect of writing this book was horribly easy, albeit traumatic. All parents live with the constant terror that something will happen to one of their children – you live with it every waking minute. If my daughter is even ten minutes late home from school I start imagining the worse – so the scenario in Whatever You Love is something I’ve been imagining for years.

The difficult bit came in describing what it was like to lose a child but in still keeping it readable and, for want of a better word, ‘entertaining’. That was where the revenge plot came in. Once I got that going, the novelist in me took over and I got over the maternal horror of the subject matter. That said, my partner found this book almost impossible to read. Laura’s daughter Betty inevitably has elements of our own daughters’ characteristics and he found that almost unbearable. He doesn’t like this one at all.

One of the most interesting relationships in the book is between Laura and Toni, the policewoman who initially comes to Laura’s door after the accident and then becomes her Family Liaison Officer. Did you speak to any police officers while writing the novel?

Yes, that was great fun. I interviewed three police officers, one of them an Inspector in charge of training Family Liaison Officers who deal with the relatives of traffic accident victims. The stories he told me made my hair curl. I really enjoyed finding out about police procedure but also developing a character  who is an officer with a human touch.

There was a lot I found out about policing, and what it does to the people who get involved with it, that I couldn’t squeeze into this book, so I am considering developing some of that material in another novel. One of the aspects of my research that was very funny was how sweet and helpful these senior officers were. I had a coffee in the Scotland Yard canteen with one of them and he was waving his fellow officers over and bragging about how he was talking to a novelist, and I was looking at him and thinking, ‘But you catch major criminals and terrorists for a living – and you think what I do is impressive?’

‘Whatever You Love’ is partly an exploration of how the desire for revenge pushes Laura to extreme emotions and actions. How did you imagine your way into her feelings? Have you ever been surprised by your behaviour in an extreme situation?

You know what, I’ve never belted anyone but there have a been a couple of situations when I’ve been really, really close. I think few people are willing to admit to their own capacity for violence, even to themselves. Most parents know though, in their heart of hearts. When another child picks on yours in the playground, you do the sensible and mature thing and talk to your child about coping strategies or go to the school – but the truth is, what you really want to do is storm in there and rip the little s**t’s head off. I have no doubt that, in Laura’s position, I would be capable of behaving how she does.

 

A lot of my fiction has been about how so-called ordinary people behave in extremis – it’s just that in this novel, it’s really close to home.

This seems like the most plot-driven novel you have written. Was that a deliberate decision?

Yes. I think all my novels are quite plot driven but this is the one where it is the most obvious. I was very interested in starting with a bang, a dramatic event – and you can’t get more dramatic than the police turning up on the main character’s doorstep in the first paragraph. It’s always a risky strategy, creating a high-octane story, because you have to work very hard on the structure and progress of the book to make sure you keep the tension up without becoming melodramatic – but I had great fun with that, and particularly with the twists at the end. I love revelations in a novel myself. I’m really hoping I pulled that one off.

Since publishing your last novel, you’ve judged several prizes – the Booker, the Orange New Writers and the John Llewellyn Rhys. Has the judging process – or simply the sheer amount of reading you had to do – affected your own writing?

I think all novelists should be avid readers of their contemporaries’ work so it’s been a great privilege to be paid and acknowledged for what I should be doing anyway. The Man Booker was a huge amount of work but throughout that year, I made sure that I set aside at least one day a week to work on Whatever You Love. I knew that if I didn’t keep up my own writing, I would go mad.

It’s a great honour to be asked to pass judgement on other people’s work and I think I’ve learned an enormous amount by doing it. Fiction in English is in such rude health in this country – there’s an amazing amount of wonderful books out there. We are so lucky.

You also teach creative writing and wrote a Telegraph column called ‘A Novel in a Year’ in 2006. Do you feel that you learn from teaching? Did you apply anything from your teaching to the writing of this novel?

I always tell my students that their craft is as important as their art. We all like to think we have the capacity for being ‘great writers’, whatever that means, but we also have to been down-to-earth about the basics like plot progression and sentence structure. Other than that, emotional stamina is enormously important because writing novels takes so long and the rewards are so uncertain. And you have to have the hide of a rhinocerous when you invite public exposure of any sort for your work.

Nobody can teach talent, of course, but it’s wonderful to meet a student with lots of raw ability and know that you kick them round the room a bit and knock them into shape. I love it.

Who are your major influences – or just your favourite writers?

Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Kate Atkinson, Ian McEwan (the substantial novels, not the short ones), William Boyd – and from the younger generation, Jill Dawson, Julie Myerson, Naomi Alderman.

I suppose the writers I like best are the ones I aspire to be, writers who understand that there’s no conflict to writing a strong story and also having wonderful prose and a high degree of psychological insight – in an ideal world, you achieve all three.

– Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love is published in June.

 

This month on the Faber Podcast, George Miller interviews scholar James Shapiro and novelist Maria McCann, both of whom have explored historical themes in their recent work.

In Professor James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Really Wrote Shakespeare? he delves into a subject that has divided scholars and historians for centuries.

And in new novel, The Wilding, Maria McCann brings to life a tumultuous family story, played out over generations, and set during the English Restoration.

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Listen to this month’s Faber Podcast here.

Visit faber.co.uk/podcast to hear all of our previous programmes.

Robert Williams is the author of Luke and Jon, an arresting debut about friendship, grief and love, and winner of the National Book Tokens’ NYP Prize.
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I was a failed songwriter. It hadn’t been all doom and gloom – there had been highlights along the way. My band recorded with New Order’s very own Peter Hook in a residential studio and we have stories that we aren’t supposed to tell. That was a good week. After the band split I carried on writing and Mark Radcliffe took a shine to my home-studio recorded single, My Town on TV, and played it a couple of times on his Radio 2 evening show and said very nice things about it. This lead to other radio plays and some interest from some parties. But after this brief flurry, after ten minutes of not being the next big thing but noticed at least… nothing (I didn’t help myself by refusing to play live of course but we can gloss over that here). The world didn’t want my songs. After ten years of struggle with the music industry I had no energy or enthusiasm left. I put my guitar in the corner of the room – strings to the wall. It was quite a miserable time and I had no idea what I was going to do next. The only thing I was sure of was that I wasn’t going to write a book. Songs are hard to write and they only last four minutes. Books last for HOURS.

 

I was working at Waterstone’s Manchester Deansgate at the time and had been for about six or seven years. It was a good place to work, most of the time. On the staff we had artists, actors, plenty of musicians, but more importantly, interesting people who were a bit obsessed with books. And, of course, there were colleagues who were working on short stories and novels too, and from what I could tell, it was hard work. Ideas that had been worked on for months would fizzle out suddenly leaving an author at a loss as to what went wrong. A book that had been worked on for years would be rejected without comment by agents and publishers in a matter of weeks. You could see the heartbreak happening. Why would you put yourself through that?

I don’t know why I started writing a book but I remember when it happened. I’d had a bad day at work and was lying on my bed staring at the back of my guitar in disgust. I got up, turned on my computer and started writing. The first few pages of Luke and Jon, well, they just sort of happened, and I have no idea why or where they came from. It makes answering the ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ question difficult. ‘I thought about nothing much, turned on the computer and started typing’ doesn’t really cut it as an answer, but it’s how it happened for me. I remember trying not to get too excited, trying to just concentrate on the writing, but at the back of my head a voice was screaming, ‘THIS IS WHAT YOU DO NEXT! THIS IS FUN! THIS IS IT!’ After that first evening I was hooked. I wrote on my coffee break, on my lunch break, when I got in from work, at the weekends. I took a week off work and wrote non-stop. Best holiday ever. I didn’t tell anybody, but I’d decided to write a book.

A couple of months later I saw a poster in the staff room at work. The poster asked if you had a manuscript you were working on. I did, so I moved closer and read on. National Book Tokens was celebrating its 75th Anniversary and was holding a competition open to anyone in the book trade. You could submit up to ten thousand words, about anything, and the winning manuscript would get £2,000* and a contract with Faber to publish the book. Not a bad prize. I tidied up my manuscript and sent my first ten thousand words off a few days later. I may have kissed the envelope for luck. I really can’t remember.

I carried on working on the manuscript because there was no way I was going to make the shortlist, and that would be depressing, and I might not want to continue with the book after that. Best get as much done as possible before the inevitable rejection. A few weeks later I got a phone call to say I had made it onto the shortlist and the winner would be announced at a ‘do’ in London in October. Great news, I thought, but best keep writing because I couldn’t possibly win and that would be even more depressing after getting so close. When I wasn’t working on the book, I was busy telling people that I wasn’t bothered about winning the competition. I was just happy to have made it onto a shortlist with my first attempt at writing I said. That was a lie. I really wanted to win.

You know when people in Eastenders say, ‘I need a drink’? I’ve never understood that; I’ve never needed a drink. I’ve never needed a drink until an hour before they announced the winner. I went to a little pub off Shaftesbury Avenue and had my drink. I had two. I told myself to relax but I couldn’t. It was either going to be one of the best nights of my life or hugely disappointing. And if I am going to be hugely disappointed I like to do it in private, not in a room full of strangers in a club on Shaftesbury Avenue. All the writers on the shortlist were introduced to each other and were encouraged to go and mingle with the room full of agents and publishers and book industry people. ‘Go and network. This is a real opportunity!’ We networked with each other in the corner. We met two of the judges who had a chat with us before the night really got going. Adele Parks was lovely and friendly and made us all feel welcome. Francis Spufford was kind and calm and a gentleman.

 

When they announced the winner I was sure I heard my name but I waited until my girlfriend pushed me forward in case my brain had played a cruel trick. I made a terrible, short speech and nearly kicked the microphone stand over as I left the little stage. It wobbled but didn’t quite fall. There was a lot of handshaking to be done then and it was a couple of hours before I could sneak out and ring my mum and dad and tell them. The next morning I did a live radio interview before slowly making my way back up to Manchester where the local paper was waiting to do an interview and take a photo. The photographer wanted me to rest my arm on a pile of books for ‘context’. He got quite impatient as I struggled to select the books on which to lean (it’s not an easy decision to make. Which books from your bookshelf would you lean on and what would your choices say about your perception of yourself? It’s a minefield). His impatience increased when he received a call to say there’d just been a stabbing in Failsworth. He had real work to do and this competition winner was holding him up. The next day I went back to work and the office was covered in balloons and banners and there was more hand-shaking and hugging to be done. But after all the back-slapping it was back to the writing. I was concerned that now I knew my book was going to be published I might find it more difficult to write. I wrote self consciously for about five minutes, deleted it and started again. And this time it was fine. All you have to do is put correct word after correct word until you’ve said everything you think want to and you can hand it in and say ‘I’ve finished.’

 

* I actually got £3,000 but I’m not sure if it was mistake or not. Don’t tell Faber.

As the editor of Hang the DJ, and a man, I’m obviously a fan of lists, but this is one of the better features that they regularly run on the Guardian’s book pages, and worth a slot in Saturday’s Review if you ask me. Anyway, it’s a long while since I’ve thought about Carter USM or Jim Bob – in fact the thought of it now brings back pretty bad school memories of baggy longsleeved t-shirts and unwashed hair – but he shows pretty immaculate taste here in his list of Top Ten Illustrated Books for Adults, including a nicely worked in top spot, two mentions for Hartlepool’s answer to Cormac McCarthy (!), and my favourite book by Douglas Coupland. And it might be a couple of years off yet, but roll on that Top Ten Books by Willy Vlautin list…

Jim Bob’s Top 10 Illustrated Books for Adults at guardian.co.uk.

Angus Cargill is editor of Hang the DJ: A Book of Alternative Music Lists.

Joanna Kavenna’s first novel Inglorious – about a thirtysomething urbanite’s escape from city life – won the Orange Broadband New Writers Award. Her new book The Birth of Love is quite different but equally brilliant – interwoven stories exploring motherhood, often quite bleak and dystopian, featuring four characters (including real Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis) across multiple time zones.

Find out more about the novel in this Q & A with Joanna …

Why did you want to write ‘The Birth of Love’?

The idea for my book first came to me in the crazy-beautiful-annihilating months after I gave birth to my first child. Everything I had known before had been blasted to pieces and, in the middle of the debris, was my wonderful, precious son. The landscape around me seemed to have altered; when I went out for a walk I saw the usual motley array of humanity – people who looked robust and joyful, or disappointed and alone, and I thought that everyone around me, even the lost and mad, had been brought into existence by a mother who had lived through the suspense of a pregnancy, and the agony of labour, and who had loved her baby beyond measure – and I had never really understood this before.

And I started to think that there is a grave paradox within human existence, that we come from such love, the unconditional love of our families, and yet we manage to construct or foster systems of domination and violence, bind ourselves with ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. I found I wanted to write about four characters who exist in different periods of history, but who are linked together across hundreds of years, and who each in their own way set love and belief against impersonal annihilating systems of dogmatism and control.

I wanted to write, too, about certainty, really about the madness of absolute certainty, because it also struck me in that wonderful, strange period after the birth of my son that all my previous certainties had been blasted apart, and also that every zealot, every ideological tyrant had once been a tiny baby, knowing nothing of the world except the smiling faces of his or her parents, and it struck me as rather absurd that anyone should set themselves up as a grand authority over anyone else, when we all come from this mysterious process, this miraculous sparking of life within the human body.

So I think I wanted to write about the struggle – it seemed to me the defining struggle of human life – of unconditional love against angry dogmatism.

The character of Dr. Semmelweis is heartbreaking. Do you think he is overdue re-examination? Why did you think it important for him to be included in the novel?

In the early months of motherhood, and then during my pregnancy with my second child, I read a lot of histories of childbirth, accounts of labour in different eras, writings on motherhood and fatherhood. So I found out about this extraordinary man, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who realized that childbed fever – a deadly illness at the time, which struck women just after they had birthed their babies – could be prevented simply by doctors washing their hands. He suggested every doctor must wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution, and he was pilloried by his colleagues. They said he was insulting them, that he was suggesting they were unclean, and he was generally ignored. In Vienna he was ignored, at least; in his home city of Budapest he had more success promoting his theories.

Semmelweis could not bear the certainty of those doctors around him who would not do this small thing, who were so adamant that they were right to ignore him. He drove himself mad, trying to convince his colleagues, and died in an asylum, ranting about a ‘massacre of mothers.’ And it was later proved that Semmelweis had been right, and that those doctors who had refused to believe him had indeed caused the deaths of countless women.

This struck me as such a forceful and tragic story … I kept reading about Semmelweis and so when I came to write my novel it seemed inevitable that he should be a character in it.

Bridget’s birthing experience is incredibly graphic. Was it important for you to write it this way? Why?

I’ve always been interested in myth and part of what I am trying to do as a writer is to write about the epic in the ordinary. The struggles of so-called ‘ordinary’ life are far more compelling to me than tales of kings and knights and classically ‘heroic’ quests. And I think, for most women, childbirth is an epic process; it’s their trials of Hercules, and they have to use all their courage and strength to get to the end. So Bridget is faced with agony and danger – the agonies and dangers of an ordinary birth – and she has somehow to struggle through.

I didn’t want to write about my own particular experience of birth, though of course I do understand what Bridget is going through in terms of pain and anxiety. But I didn’t want it to be ‘my birthing story’, so I tried to combine several births I had heard about from friends, and I added in odd details that people had told me – often complete strangers, shop assistants, or people on buses, who saw me with my small children and suddenly came out with these fascinating memories of their own experiences.

Your vision of 2153 is quite bleak. Do you think that the authoritarian control over childbearing you depict in the future could be easily realized?

To me it is absolutely a fantasy. I have no idea what might happen in the future. I set this section of my book in the future because I wanted to create a very extreme society of a particular sort. So I realized it either had to be set in the future or in a parallel universe. I went for the future.

To me it’s not entirely bleak, because although the future society I portray is very oppressive, there is a small group of people who refuse to accept what is happening around them. This came naturally from Semmelweis – where you have a man who was regarded as a lunatic by the doctors of his age, and yet it transpired that he was right, and his medical peers were mad to ignore him.

So in 2153 I wanted to look at another sort of sanctioned madness – a hyper-scientific view of the world which has got completely out of hand. Effectively the science has become a religion, and the scientists have become priests of this religion. They believe man is engaged in a war against nature, that nature must be controlled by science. It has become illegal for women to become pregnant and to birth babies naturally. Instead everything is controlled in laboratories – this way you have no surprises, you can create precisely the sort of human being you want.

Despite this, a woman becomes pregnant. With some friends, she goes to an abandoned island to birth her child in secret. She and her friends are afraid the whole time – of being caught and punished or killed, of the child being destroyed as ‘imperfect’ and so on. Despite their fears, they are greatly moved by what they witness, an ordinary birth which has become – for them – an improbable miracle. And it gives them hope …

Do you think that men and women may respond differently to the issues raised in the novel?

I don’t quite know. To me the central themes of my book are not ‘gendered’ at all. Both men and women love their children beyond measure. Both men and women have to find ways to live for themselves and their families, despite the regimes and orthodoxies which may seek to control them.

The whole business of trying to find your way in life, of trying to work out what to believe, how to sift through the babble of contradictory voices telling you what to think – that applies equally to men and women. I think sometimes childbirth gets written about as a ‘women’s issue’, whatever that means, because it is women who physically birth children. But of course we all come from this process, and fathers who observe the births of their children are profoundly moved, shocked in a different way from the mothers but still completely transformed all the same. They go through their own initiation rite; they stand transfixed, watching their child emerge …

Do you think having your own children has influenced the way you have written your book?

Well it was very much written in the midst of early motherhood – I began it when my son was a small baby, reading and writing while he slept on my lap, and then I finished a first draft just before my second child was born – my daughter – and then I was rewriting that draft with her as a newborn, sleeping again on my lap.

I’m glad I wrote it during this time because although I was often very tired, I was in touch with a sense of deep strangeness, of the bizarre beauty of the whole thing – I was breast-feeding my children or pregnant, so I was physically very much involved in this process of creating and nurturing children. And that changes you a lot, and it’s astonishing – I see it now – how you forget it, how the memory of what it was like physically and emotionally fades.

Also for me it was a very different way of writing, technically. Prior to this novel, I always wrote on a computer. With The Birth of Love, I was so often writing with babies asleep on my lap, or next to me, so I had to write longhand, and the whole thing was written in notebooks and only typed up at the end.  Also, because I was writing in very intense bursts, always with this sense that at any moment the baby might wake, I would be prevented from continuing, I was much more focused than I usually am. I couldn’t move, half the time, because I didn’t want to disturb whichever baby was asleep on me, so it was a bit like being tied to a desk, perhaps ..!

I don’t know if this is the best way to write in general, but I think for me it was the only way I could have written this book, at this time, and so it was a necessary experiment.

What were your influences in writing the novel?

The usual ones really – Knut Hamsun, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawarence, Mark Twain, Joseph Campbell, William James, Iain Sinclair, Charlotte Bronte, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Musil, Albert Camus, Saul Bellow, Philip K Dick, Jens Bjorneboe, Margaret Atwood and so on …

Do you feel a particular affinity to or sympathy for any one character? Why?

I sympathise with various characters in different ways, for different reasons. When we first meet Bridget she is a mother of one, preparing for the arrival of her second child, with a great deal of excitement and trepidation mingled. And I remember that state very vividly – being heavily pregnant with my second child and wondering how on earth I would manage with two children under 3, whether I would be a good enough mother, a patient enough person.

I was very moved by Semmelweis’s story when I read about it – by the way he persisted even in the face of general condemnation or indifference, and the way he felt so horribly guilty about the women he had infected with childbed fever, before he knew how it was spread, and so incredibly angry about the further lives that were lost because his colleagues wouldn’t believe him.

I wanted to give him a friend, someone who listened to him – and so I created the character of Robert von Lucius, a man who visits Semmelweis in the asylum during his final days, and becomes convinced that Semmelweis is right, though too late to save his life.

Then there are the prisoners in 2153, who haven’t done anything morally wrong, but again they are confronted with authority figures who invert everything, who tell them their love and compassion for others are in fact crimes against the social order.

– The Birth of Love is published in May.