Authors Electric

Almost half my life ago, I started writing a book. I only had scraps of time to write it, and I did so on a flimsy desk squeezed into a corner of my small bedroom in London. Over the next few years I continued writing it, wherever I happened to be. In London there were sometimes cats fighting in the adjacent car park. In Cambridge, I camped out illicitly in the grandeur of a college residence, looking straight onto a Tudor gateway and a statue of Henry VIII. In the American West there were squirrels playing on the cables that criss-crossed the front of my apartment. Back in Britain, I found myself briefly in a bed-sit over a Thai restaurant. My book – my epic, as my family came to call it - had begun with three persistent ideas and images. A girl abandoned on a lonely island with an old man, whose own history was mysterious to her. A Walled City under threat. And some fleeting, tenuous ideas about the nature of freedom, and whether it can ever be reconciled with communal sa...