Every character I have written arrives with a history I must discover, not invent. They do not spring fully formed from imagination — they accumulate, like sediment, over years of watching, listening, and quietly storing what I observe about how people carry their lives.
When I began work on The Unforeseen, I knew that the three women at its centre would each hold a different relationship to the past. One would flee from it. Another would be defined by it. And the third — the one who interested me most — would pretend, successfully for most of her life, that it had nothing to do with her at all.
This is what history does to people. Not the history of textbooks, which is clean and linear and comfortably finished, but the personal history that sits in the body and resurfaces without warning: in a gesture, in a phrase heard across a crowded room, in the particular quality of afternoon light over water.
I think about Cyprus often these days. The island that gave me the story for my next book is also the island where I first understood how profoundly place shapes a person — how the land itself becomes a character, demanding to be heard.
Writing is, for me, the art of listening to those demands.