While I was writing the book, one of my children was diagnosed with dyslexia. Dyslexia is a very tiny word for a wide-ranging neurological condition ….

There was so much anti-Irish sentiment not just from other kids at the school I went to in Britain, but also the teachers themselves. I remember very….

People had tell me the most personal things. People I'd never met before would say thing like "Oh, that was the summer I had an affair with my neighb….

My husband, William Sutcliffe, the writer, is my first reader and in many ways my most important. That initial reading of the manuscript is crucial a….

In the course of writing a book I'll produce loads of pieces of paper to help the novel itself. Diagrams, charts, family trees. And at the end of eac….

All the time I was plowing through books on dyslexia, I found myself asking: what if, what if? What if you were a kid the 1950s with this condition, ….

The key thing in my becoming a writer was going on a Arvon Foundation residential writing course. I took with me a really messy twenty thousand words….

I think all families have these secrets, and it's sometimes the strangest things that bring them out. That was part of my interest in the heatwave, i….

I was interested in the ripples of feminism passing through Britain and Ireland in the mid-Seventies - how the reverberations of the feminist politic….

You need a lot of energy to get a novel finished. You need an ability to ignore everyone around you. It's why I don't read my reviews any more. I kno….

When I worked at The Independent newspaper, I had colleagues who would laugh and say that whenever they picked up the phone to my dad and heard his a….

I met a retired police detective. And he said to me that the interesting thing about heatwaves, from a police perspective, is that the number of peop….

In the first night of the Arvon Foundation course, Elspeth Barker said something about the newspaper along the lines of - and I'm paraphrasing - "I d….

Spending a lot of time away from home was strange. My parents visited me, obviously, but I was in hospital a lot, alone. And then when my health had ….

We all have a family, whether we like it or not; we all come from somewhere, and there's something strange in the way you have, with siblings, two or….

When my family moved from Ireland in the 70s, Britain was such a difficult place to be Irish. It was a decade of real social and economic upheaval in….

Something that had an enormous influence over my relationship with language was my stammer. I had a really bad stammer in my childhood and adolescenc….

I always had the urge to write. Not in the sense of wanting to be a writer, but just writing things down, getting words on a page. Graphomania, it's ….

I still have a stammer. I hate it; I loathe and despise it. But it's always there, and I have lots of ways to conceal it. I can conceal it now but I'….

I don't want to be influenced as to what I write in the next book, to hear those voices in my head when I'm writing. The idea of second-guessing your….

She wanted to say, no. She wanted to say, I have a son, there is a child, this cannot happen. Because you know that no one will ever love them like y….