1. Who are your literary heroes?

I have so many! Vladimir Nabokov and Toni Morrison for their perfection of voice. Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino for their formal inventiveness. James Baldwin for the political power of his fiction. F Scott Fitzgerald and Antonio Tabucchi for their mastery of brevity. Saadat Hasan Manto for his fearless honesty about South Asia. Camus, Hemingway, Tolstoy... I could go on and on.

2. What are your religious beliefs?

I think religious beliefs are a personal matter. But to take up your question in a secular manner, I believe that empathy is more reliably a force for good than righteousness is.

3. Have you experienced suspicion/prejudice in the wake of 9/11?

Certainly. I have been stopped at airports, spent hours being questioned at immigration desks, and had difficulty getting visas. But I have also found myself being suspicious and discriminatory. When a man who looks like me and has a beard (as I sometimes do) boards the tube with a backpack, I sometimes feel a moment of unease. So I recognize in myself the symptoms of the same illness that I condemn in others. It is easy to make human beings afraid of each other. The fears that give rise to discrimination are so widespread as to be almost universal. What is more important is how we handle our fears.

4. Did you worry about writing about such an emotive subject as 9/11??

I did worry about it. It was not my intention to cause offence or to mock the suffering of others. So I worked hard to treat the subject in a way that was honest but at the same time respectful. Sometimes, when exercising one's right to freedom of speech, one's intention is as important as the substance of one's position. My intention was to engage in an exploration of differences with all of my readers, not to provoke or insult some of them.

5. What made you choose to write the novel as a monologue?

A monologue is by definition one-sided: I wanted to signal that the story told by the novel's protagonist would be biased. But a monologue, unlike a straight first-person narrative, is addressed to a particular "you": it invites the audience to come onstage, to play a role. So the novel asks the reader to judge what is happening, to redress its one-sidedness - in other words, to play a more active role in co-creating the meaning of the book.