I start, as always – it’s hardly ‘inspiration’ – with confusion. Someone said, ‘ We all lead lives of quiet desperation.’ I’m not nearly so pessimistic, but I think we all lead lives of quiet confusion. Plenty of people want to tell us that life’s not confusing or to tell us how to live it, but I think our familiar, raw, inner sense of life is that it’s confusing. Fiction should be honest about this. It’s on the wavelength of this shared quiet confusion that I want to connect with my readers. We’re all in the same boat, in teh same sea of confusion – story-telling is a way of navigating through it.

The Light of Day has a strong sense of place. It’s set almost entirely in a familiar suburban, South London, world, yet within this ordinary environment some very dramatic things occur. Can you expand on this?

Ever since I wrote my novel Waterland, in which the setting plays a big part, I’ve believed that a strong sense of location is vital in telling a story, if only because experience is local and located. We don’t live ‘globally’, our existence is intimately bound up with our familiar ‘neck of the woods’ – places, rooms, neighbourhoods, daily journeys and routines. But by the same token I believe the local is the key to the universal, to what may be true about human nature anywhere. A novelist can perhaps find all he or she needs just round the corner. My books, local as their settings are, have been widely translated, so something about them must nonetheless ‘travel’ and strike chords with people in many different places.

Yes, the setting for The Light of Day couldn’t be more ordinary – Wimbledon! But I think the great challenge is to see, to find, to appreciate the strange and remarkable within the familiar. In fact, my novel deals with some pretty dislocated worlds – the world of prisons, for example, and of refugees – but, more than this, it deals with the capacity within us all , even as we remain in familiar surroundings, to step into unsuspected zones, to cross lines of inner geography. You have a man, George – an ex-policeman, hardly a romantic – who could never have dreamed he could fall in love as suddenly and fully as he does or that the world could open up for him as it does; and a woman, Sarah, comfortably off and seemingly happily married, who could never have dreamed she could commit murder or that the world could literally close up for her as it does. Though she has George.

We all exist within the most familiar ‘location’ there is – our selves. What could be more familiar more ‘known’? Yet we all, I think, have a sneaking suspicion that we don’t really know what lies inside us, what we’re really ‘made of’ and what, in certain circumstances we might be capable of – for good or ill. The Light of Day explores this deep kind of self-discovery that might, for good or ill, elude us all our lives. But I think the good in the novel outweighs the ill, the light the dark – hence the title. My novel is a rather special love story, but I hope it’s more than that. Novelists hate to say in a nutshell, what their books are about, but I can get round this by repeating what a very perceptive reader said to me. They said it’s about a man discovering his own goodness, his own better nature. I agree – and what could be more optimistic?

The book, though it’s not long, clearly took time to write and is extremely well crafted. One feels there isn’t a single word that’s not been considered. Please tell us about your writing process, do you do many drafts?