Officially, I was a writer of non-fiction for the first half of my career, and I certainly enjoyed scraping up against the stubborn, resistant, endlessly interesting surface of the real world. I like awkwardness, things that don't fit, things that put up a struggle against being described. But when I was excited by what I was writing about, what I wanted to do with my excitement was always to tell a story. So every one of my non-fiction books borrowed techniques from the novel, and contained sections where I came close to behaving like a novelist. The chapter retelling the story of Captain Scott's last Antarctic expedition at the end of "I May Be Some Time", for example, or the thirty-page version of the gospel story in "Unapologetic". It wasn't a total surprise that in 2010 I published a book, "Red Plenty", which was a cross between fiction and documentary, or that afterwards I completed my crabwise crawl towards the novel with the honest-to-goodness entirely-made-up "Golden Hill". This was a historical novel about eighteenth century New York written like, well, an actual eighteenth century novel: hyperactive, stuffed with incident, and not very bothered about genre or good taste. It was elaborate, though. It was about exceptional events, and huge amounts of money, and good-looking people talking extravagantly in a special place. Nothing wrong with any of that: I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan and a Joss Whedon fan, keen on dialogue that whooshes around like a firework display. But those were the ingredients of romance, and there were other interesting things to tell stories about, so my next novel "Light Perpetual" in 2021 was deliberately plainer, about the lives that five London children might have had if they hadn't been killed in 1944 by a German rocket. Ordinary lives, in theory; except that there are no ordinary lives, if you look closely enough. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. And now (2023) I am returning to strong forms of story, and to plotting more like "Golden Hill", with a noir crime novel called "Cahokia Jazz", set in the 1922 of a different timeline, where a metropolis full of Native Americans stands on the banks of the Mississippi. Gunfire! Clarinet solos! Wisecracking journalists! Men in hats! Femmes fatales! All remixed to, I hope, different effect. Unexpected effect, as the old pleasures do new imaginative work. The idea is to screen for you, on the page, something like the best black and white movie you never saw.
Biography: I was born in 1964, the child of two historians. I'm married to an Anglican priest, I have two daughters, and I teach writing at Goldsmiths College, London, just next door to the place where a V2 fell on a branch of Woolworths.
