Was your childhood ambition always to be a writer?

I was a passionate reader as a child, and though for a long time I had no ambition to write, I now know that my childhood made me a writer.  It was the 1950s, we lived in the country, and I had an extraordinary freedom. I walked and walked the lanes, and as I grew older, and we moved, I constantly told myself stories, trying to recapture my country life. Walking home from school, I’d reach my own road and turn back again, not wanting to break off the story, which somehow I could only tell on the hoof, or in bed.  It wasn’t until I wrote The Hours of the Night (1996) that I realised that all my writing was really a search for the lost landscape of my childhood, and that though I was writing about the Welsh borders I was also rediscovering those Leicestershire country lanes, with swallows swooping ahead of me, and the sound of hens. Even now, to write the word ‘lane’ reconnects me with those days.

How long have you been writing?

Since I was thirty: a late starter. I fell in love, and began a short story, which won the London Writers competition. But I didn’t really settle down to write until I was thirty-six, at home with my baby son, and carving out time for my first novel: Spring Will Be Ours (1985 – I think) which began with the wartime history of my Polish in-laws.

What do you most enjoy about writing?

Travelling to and losing myself in another place – which might include the past, as in The Mysteries of Glass (2004): set in a quiet country parish in 1860.  And refining every sentence: it gives me joy at that level, too.

Which writers do you admire? Which authors have influenced your writing the most and why?

I am treating these questions as one, since to admire is also to absorb some influence, I think. Katherine Mansfield has been the greatest influence, though it took me a long time to realise that. Kezia, the child in her long New Zealand stories, stands, I think,  behind some of the children I’ve created: Meredith in Earth & Heaven (2000) and Alice in The Mysteries of Glass. Virginia Woolf’s novels and diaries stand alone as works of genius. Contemporary writers I admire include Alice Thomas Ellis and Shena Mackay, whose early work is some of the boldest and most stylistically inventive of any English writer. And Justin Cartwright: a great range of ideas, a wonderful stylist, and a great humanitarian. I also admire Michèle Hanson’s Guardian columns: the funniest and sharpest woman in Britain.

What are you reading at the moment?

Justin Cartwright: The Song Before It Is Sung, just published.

To what extent has your life experience influenced your writing?

As I say, I think it all stems from my childhood: time to be alone, all the experiences of living in the country, before the technological revolution. A much simpler and more wholesome time. Later, life of course grew more complicated, and I think a number of my novels are driven by emotional crises.

Did you know how Reading in Bed would end before you started writing it?

No. With some of my novels I’ve worked the whole way through towards a particular last line, but here I did not know either the way things would be resolved, or what the last lines would be. I felt as if I had thrown a lot of balls up in the air with no idea of how I was going to bring them down again. In the end, everything felt as if it was falling into the right place, but the actual last lines I changed from the first draft, realising I needed something more indefinite, rippling away from event to idea. It’s a very secular book, but I wanted something of the spirit in the way it ends.

What inspired your new novel, Reading in Bed?

Originally, it was all focussed on Chloe, the thirty-something dyslexic stylist, who in the first draft opened the whole novel. Those opening lines were with me for about four years before I sat down to write. Then I watched two old friends leaving a restaurant in the pouring rain one evening, and everything turned round: they gave me a new opening line, and a whole new dimension to the novel, which now became about age, as well as youth. My own experience of illness and bereavement is also to some extent worked into the novel, but love and romance are very important as the counterpoint to this. I was, however, very clear that I didn’t want to write a novel in which a widowed woman turns her life round and meets a new man. There’s enough of that about in fiction already, and I wanted to write something real and true: to life, and to my characters.