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I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

A falcon is the perfect hunter.

'The Dovekeepers' is a fantastic novel written by Alice Hoffman; it was a bestselling novel, and I fell in love with the book and bought the rights to it.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

A lot of times, the inspiration for a novel is a messy bird's nest of shiny things. Little things that don't make a whole lot of sense or that, no matter how hard you look, cannot be found directly in the finished book.

I grew up reading books about heroic collies.

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.