The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.
There's only one set of books I've written that I knew was going to be more than one book at the beginning, and those are the 'Missing Link' books.
I guess there is also an element of deliberate change involved. Each of my books has been, at least from my point of view, radically different from the last.
The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.
Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
I try not to recommend too many books, frankly, because I think there's a certain synchronicity that happens when people discover books.
This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.
I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.