1.  Who are the writers who have had the biggest influence on you?

I'd say Don Delilo,  Salman Rushdie, Kenzaburō Ōe,  Anna Akhmatova, D.H Lawrence,  Ferlinghetti, Milan Kundera, Siri Hustvedt, Dylan Thomas, Chekhov, James Salter, Arundhati Roy, Gerard Woodward. 

2. Are the writings about Cardiff and India based on personal experiences?

Like most first novels it is a mishmash of hijacked, inherited, imagined and remembered biographies, including my own.  Plus some research.

3. Is the word 'abuse' towards the end of the book there to shock or shame?

It is a very particular word, one that is put forward as received knowledge, over which the parents have no control. I suppose more than anything it is an official word, in that context, signifying a transgression - something that is supposed to be 'fact', at a time when right and wrong are quite confused in the universe of the novel. 

4. Did the author feel that the ending was there to give hope?

The ending is one for the reader to feel their way through instinctively. After a lot of thrashing around, I wrote it pretty instinctively and quickly, without too much analysis, but it seems to make sense to me at least, on looking back!

5. The book covers several themes - family relationships, the experience of immigrants, intelligence and society's views of this and the struggles around coming of age. Did the author intend to cover all these issues or did she start with a particular theme in mind? Why are these themes important to her?

I think when I began writing the novel it was just supposed to be a series of stories that would coagulate into a kind of coming of age moment. It was that vague. Very soon into the novel, I realised the girl I was writing about had a lot of kooks and peculiarities that were coming from an interest in maths. And of course, the family were of Indian origin, living in the UK at that particular time. So the themes emerged pretty quickly but not with pre-meditation. Once I could see them, they were constantly visible, and I suppose it was about forgetting them and just getting on with writing it.