Yes, it was. The chapters are very nearly in the order I wrote them. This was how the story came to me – moving backwards and forwards through time and between the characters. Someone called this kind of storytelling a ‘Chinese box’ with the narrative unfolding from a central point rather than being linear. As I wrote each chapter, it was another piece of the jigsaw for me too.

The opening is vivid, shocking and captivating all at once. Was the drowning accident where the story started for you?

The first scene to be written, the real beginning, was the story of the Toad Ferry (which started out as Frog Ferry until a naturalist pointed out that its toads that migrate and not frogs!) It was one of a series of pieces I was writing simply as experiments, seeing where an idea would take me. I’d no plan for Toad Ferry becoming the setting for a novel or even a short story. My only aim was to describe a village with a quirky annual ritual. The original version of this chapter was longer and there were hints of magic and fantasy, and eccentricity in the inhabitants which I later cut.

The drowning accident was the second piece to be written. I knew it could be part of a much larger story but didn’t plan to go on with it at that pint. The scene came easily and unexpectedly to me, and I was shocked and captivated too in the writing of it! As images sometimes do, it seemed to come from nowhere, nothing I could pinpoint, just a picture in my mind of a little leaky boat and the children gradually sinking as they float down a broad slow river on a sunlit evening.

Next I wrote the pieces about Xavier and Adelie coming to England, Anna fleeing to Devon (Anna and Thomas aare characters I already knew; they’d appeared in a short story), Sarah, and the young Robert leaving St Kilda.

It was then that the surprise happened – and this was where the story really started for me; I realised (I can only say ‘realised’ because it felt to me more like a revelation or a discovery rather than something consciously plotted) that these characters were linked by the drowning of Cathering and Jack. It was an odd moment. I didn’t quite know all these people could be joined in a single story but I knew that they were. The story unfolded from there.

Isabel’s tenuous hold on sanity is wonderfully conveyed. How did you get inside her head so convincingly?

Isabel is no one I’ve ever met and her loss isn’t something I’ve experienced, but perhaps we all have access to feelings of terrible loss either through experience or witnessing it close to, or simply letting ourselves imaging how it might be. Don’t we all frighten ourselves sometimes with imaging for a second; what if the very worst happened, the most unthinkable? Writing Isabel, of all the characters in The River, drew most deeply on my resources. I felt terrible grief at times when I was writing her scenes. I had to try to be her, to let myself imagine how she might really feel – and it was sometimes almost unbearable. I have to admit to weeping on my keyboard! She is a difficult, uneasy woman but I have huge sympathy for her and empathy with her suffering. I like her and have sense of the woman she might have been had her life been different. As a young girl she was courageous and resourceful and passionate. She is kind and practical when Adelie and Edward are grieving for Josephine. She was a loyal and loving wife. In a way, her madness, if that’s what it is, makes absolute sense in the context of what has happened to her.

Might Robert and Isabel have fared better if they had left the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small village after the tragic loss of their children?

They might, but I do see why they don’t. I can imaging that Robert might have left had it not have been for Sarah. There is a part of Isabel that has never accepted that her children are gone and so she cannot leave. In a way it is Isabel that make the village the claustrophobic place that it is and I wonder if she would have somehow recreated that around her wherever she lived. I imagine that had they left, there would have been nothing to hold Isabel and Robert together and that too is another unconscious reason for staying. Their bond, which was once passion and love and is now its shadow, keeps them rooted to the place.

By isolating herself – first by the moving into Cameldip and then retreating further by living in the treehouse – Anna becomes vulnerable. For her, the village is a dangerous place isn’t it?

I think Anna wants to isolate herself – or at least make a new start, be a new person. She imagines that somehow, in a different place, she will have more control over her life and be less manipulated and undermined by those around her. At first the treeehouse seems to fit perfectly with her idea of her new self – it is separate, individual, private. It is also rather childish and impractical, things that Anna does not have the insight to see in herself. And her need for a mother figure of course leads her straight back in to the very things she’s trying to escape; Isabel undermines and manipulates her. The village is a dangerous place but more so because Anna cannot see clearly her own part in things. My sense of her is that it’s her own naivety that makes her so vulnerable.

The tension in the story is almost unbearable. After Isabel attacks Anna, I couldn’t put the book down until I found out what happened. Is this an aspect of writing you enjoy?

I’ve always been apprehensive about writing scenes of high drama because I think it’s so difficult not to tip over into melodrama. But Isabel’s violence was unavoidable – what I mean is that when I came to the writing of this scene, I couldn’t do it differently. I felt that Isabel’s fury toward Anna was her only possible reaction at this point in the story. And yes, I wrote the rest of the noel quickly, never sure of what might happen further than a  page or two ahead. I’m glad there was a feeling of tension and suspense and I did feel pulled along in the writing of it. What I enjoy in writing  - an it happened here – is not knowing how things will turn out.

At the end of the story, Anna has no memory of the violence done to her. Is the implication that, like Isabel’s tragedy, the after-effects will continue to haunt her life?

I’m not sure. My feeling is that although Anna is central – the catalyst that at last brings some kind of resolution for Isabel and Robert – the story is not, in essence, Anna’s story. Although she is physically wounded, she has come through it emotionally and psychologically almost unchanged. Her life has circles back to Thomas and London, almost where she left off. My sense is that if her memories do gradually return (and in my mind, they do), she may have to deal with the trauma of the violence done to her by a woman that she thinks cared for her, but I don’t feel that Anna is someone who will be haunted, who will analyse and reassess and examine the past. She is too open to life in the present, letting it sweep her along. This is her weakness and also what I like about her. She is essentially such a different character to Isabel. Anna lacks the fierce independence and passion and single-mindedness that  are, in a way, at the root of Isabel’s suffering.

The river could be seen as the main character in this story – working on several levels. Are you particularly interested in the way people interact with the natural world?

This is such an interesting question and somehow the most difficult to answer. I wonder if perhaps whatever the significance of the river in the novel, it was not conscious on my part. A reader might see it more clearly than I do and I’d love to hear more about the layers character of the river. But I am indeed interested in the way people interact with the natural world and what it shows about them – their relationship with their own spiritual and physical and animal selves. Part of the enjoyment of writing the book was in creating an idyllic landscape with its great meandering river  that so many things; benevolent, indifferent, raging, consoling. The landscape of Cameldip was a place for me to inhabit as well as the characters.

Much of the writing in this remarkable novel is lyrical, even dreamlike. Yet the evocative domestic details anchor the story in reality. Is this a difficult balance to achieve?

It is a balance – two things, opposites almost, weighted against each other. But perhaps it’s also that these things exist in parallel. The extraordinary and the dreamlike are woven into the everydayness of life; that’s what reality is for most of us  I think.  Even on the most routine and unremarkable of days there will be moments of magic and glimpses of the poetic. And conversely, in the most romantic and fantastic and extraordinary of lives and places there is still the washing-up to be done and the children to be fed and taken to school. It’s always a balance and a struggle between our inner lives and our practical lives, and if I have achieved it in The River it is because I wanted these people and this place to exist in the round.