Richard's life is unravelling: his beautiful wife, Valerie, is having an affair, his son Maxence may (or may not) be mentally disturbed, and the idyllic life he'd hoped for when they moved to Provence has become more nightmare than paradise. Suddenly, a routine trip to Africa to sell pharmaceuticals is more than he can handle and his life starts to implode as he realizes that the idea of a life full of that love he has cherished is a mere illusion.

For Richard and Valerie's neighbour Rachel, a trip to Africa also leads to feelings of confusion and doubt. Now Rachel, and her husband Jeff, as well as Richard and Valerie, are left groping for the things that once defined them. In this bold and tender story, both families find themselves desperately seeking the answer to one question: just what is the idea of love - and can it save them?

But for the children in the story, the awkward unsettling Maxence and angelic little Maud, the idea of love is much simpler...

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What is The Idea of Love about?
This is a book about the different kinds of love - sexual love, romantic love, and altruism or 'charity'. And about the damage we do with them. The book deals with the 'idea of love' most common in our media - the imperative to be loved (rather than 'to love'). The casualties in the book are the children. Each of the four lovers in the book is seeking love as in 'being loved' when the book begins. They are two couples, neighbours, in the South of France, an American, and Englishwoman, a French woman and an Englishman - all there to live the 'good life'. They find a party waiting for them with other like minded middle class families - Dutch and English. Two of the four lovers go to Africa with Western mandates - one for charity, one for commerce, and both of them find themselves impotent there. Seeing their home lives with fresh eyes on their return, disaster strikes and almost as if in a puff of smoke both of the homes fold and one of the lovers loses everything over night, including his mind. Looking closer still, they can see there is a lack of love in their homes and that one of the children is very disturbed. In particular, one man, Richard loses overnight his wife, his home, his son and his job and begins to unravel. This book has something to say about the ways in which men are affected by divorce and the great risk to their wellbeing. This is a book about mental illness and its relationship with the longing for unconditional love. As with all my books, there is a great deal of black humour in the book.

What are you reading at the moment?
I read and re-read “Everyman’ by Philip Roth as a textbook on clean good writing. And similarly, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ by John Coetzee. I am also reading Philip Hensher ‘The Northern Clemency’ and Nick Laird’s poetry

Which author do you most admire?
John Coetzee, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Saramago, Garcia Marquez, Ivan Klima, Milan Kundera (Living)

What is your greatest fear?
The death of one of my children

How would you like to be remembered?
As the greatest writer of my generation. Why else write?

Have you ever done something that you've really regretted?
Yes. Regret is a firm hand on conscience. I revisit these things in my books as a way of chastising myself. It’s why my bad characters are believable, and pitiable.

What's your favourite book?
‘The End of the Affair’ by Graham Greene perhaps, but there are so many…

Who (or what) do you turn to in a crisis?
My mother and father

What makes you angry?
Bad manners and condescension

Which foreign country would you most like to visit?
Any country in South/Latin America – it's the region I have never been to

How do you relax?
In the bath, reading

What are you most proud of?
Keeping dinner coming. Making the birthday cakes. The practical side of love

Where do you write?
I prepare my old bank desk for a proper writer to use in my study then move elsewhere. I like to be at large, and so I sit in my conservatory at my laptop squinting in the discomfort of sunlight, smoking.

Which is your favourite city and why?
New York. Its methodological streets and high octane neighbourhoods haunt my dreams.

If you had one wish what would it be?
To die working. But not anytime soon.

Now that he loves Rachel he can see that losing his family was only a formality; they were never his. He’d attached himself to them believing that being sufficiently foreign, sufficiently quaint, almost rural and almost Catholic they were implicitly better or at the very least – different.

In truth he’d rarely been at home. He was more of a tourist when it came to family life. That thought brought to mind a slogan daubed on a wall in Soweto on one of his first business trips to South Africa just the year before apartheid crumbled: Soweto is no zoo for tourist pigs. How pricked he’d felt on his tour bus then. Family life is no zoo either. At thirty-eight years old hesawthat he’d been ten years staring at the one cage, the chimps, failing to make any deductions while they aped his forlorn stare, mimicked his gestures, mirrored his pose. An Englishman with a French wife, they lived in one of the small market towns that is on the crossroads of rip-you-off-Riviera and rob-you-blind-Provence. It was an uneventful and lonely place for ten months of the year. To the casual eye it was a romantic place; gorge and ravine, Saracen tower and stony river bed but as one grew more accustomed to the place, one’s eyes were drawn to the signs of the struggle between man and nature; here and there in the middle of a vineyard or a field the stray abandoned one-room dwelling; broken down, exposed, done with.

They’d come to live there seeking a rural counterpart to his place of work; Richard’s company’s head office was situated in the Californian-style suburbs of Antibes with its anodyne office blocks and roundabouts giving on to roundabouts. He’d worked, when he met her, for ten years in the dismal man-made ‘town’ of Croydon for the French pharmaceutical group Europharm, latterly as their youthful Sales Director. He’d drunk in a pub underneath an underpass and lived in a flat overlooking a flyover.

A year after Valerie moved in with him he was relocated to head office in Antibes – it seemed too good to be true as she was by then sick and tired of England – and so they decided to quit, for good they said, town life. She stayed behind packing his things, disposing of much of his past he found out later, while he went ahead for a month-long immersion course in business French. They meant to be happy.

When they moved out to the South of France, she was pregnant, and they gathered to them what she had for family in France, her quick-minded mother and her regretful father – and they made a home for themselves in the Var region of Provence. He was promoted to regional positions and oversaw in the new markets of Eastern Europe sales of psycho-pharmaceuticals, those mindbending drugs as he dubbed them, principally anti-depressants but also anti-psychotics, with the highest profit margin of any product known to man, more profitable even than oil. In these developing consumer markets, his client, the psychiatrist, was clamouring to prescribe chemicals to people struggling – as Richard saw it – with the transition from the old rural community-based life to the new lonesome urban standard.

Richard knew from his work, from the pockets of madness and gluts of sadness emerging throughout the urban sprawl, that his family would be better off in the countryside amongst a community, even if he had to create it with his own hands, even if he had to spend money to make it, even if he had to fake it . . .

And then, of a sudden, it was over. He’d failed. And he and his neighbour’s wife, Rachel, both of them learnt in different ways, that whilst good may spring from love, love rarely springs from good intentions alone.

When his wife, Vale´rie, left him for Jeff, his friend and neighbour, he was incensed, and in his burning and breaking he made himself a refugee from his former life. He lost his entire wherewithal within a month of her leaving – the family, the house, the job – and he lost his grip on reason. The locals round there said that a forest fire was a necessary evil for it was the fire that released the seeds from the cones of the pine tree.

He’d thought of himself as a romantic and indeed he had been insomuch as the romantic clings to the idea of love rather than daring to love. (Though they don’t mind being loved, if you insist . . .)Buthedidn’t know what love was until he lost everything. He found himself, one day in September, at the centre of an illusion, seeing suddenly that his family was not his family after all, that his son was not the happy child he thought him, and that his best friend was not a friend at all. In fact, his wife didn’t know him, his family were in his pay, his son was disturbed, and his friend was despicable; a womanizer who barely liked women, a coward and a dodger.

And Richard hated him because they were alike, and he too coveted his neighbour’s wife.