Other reasons: I think it is partly because there is a popular misconception in literature that 'ordinary lives', by virtue of being ordinary, are therefore uninteresting. An odd misconception, not shared by TV. A further reason is that it is obviously easier to write about one's own background than a distant one, and very few people from my kind of background had a decent education, I suppose.

Rumours of a Hurricane is quite a political book - what effect do you think Thatcher's Britain had on people?
An enormous and largely unanswerable question. I don't know if Hurricane is a political book - political books tend towards polemic which, I hope, Hurricane doesn't. The effects of the Thatcher decade were so various, it hardly bears answering head-on. Clearly many unfamiliar concepts were introduced into British life from both the right and the left. The idea of non-consensus government, of low taxation, of encouraging private enterprise, of, in effect, punishing the poor, was all novel. On the left, gay rights, an emerging black consciousness and feminism all served to heighten the dislocation. Meanwhile, off the political agenda, drug use became mainstream. If you want me to sum up what was good and bad about the decade, I put it this way:

Bad - the attack on public services and the public service ethic.
Good - the limiting of union power and the taming of inflation.
Bad - the shift away from a public sensibility to a private.
Good - the fact you could get a nice cup of coffee and a decent suit at last.

In Maureen, you have a woman who changes radically over a decade, in Charlie a man who doesn't - do you think attitudes to change and perhaps to success and ambition are related to gender?
Duh. I'm not sure. Increasingly, there's less to choose between attitudes to change and success between men and women since the 80s. Women have increasingly taken on men's idealisation and definitions of 'success'. Whether that represents progress, I'm not sure. Women, it seems to me, do cope with change better. And many of the changes over the last few decades have been in their favour (and overdue). It is a far more healthy place to be psychologically, I suspect, to be a somewhat marginalised group moving forward to a kind of justice than being a member of a dominant group being forced to abandon its traditional privileges.

One of the things that is unusual about this novel is that it is also about money and property, something which the Americans have written about in fiction but which rarely comes up in contemporary British fiction - why?
I find it hard to speak for British fiction. Is it true that money and property have not featured in contemporary British fiction? I would find it hard myself to write an interesting book that was centred on property. As for money - well, notwithstanding Amis's Money and Coe's What a Carve Up, I find it difficult to believe that there haven't been a fair number of books written in which money is an important element. It's true that I can't bring any to mind though. Then, I am blissfully ill-read. I should just say, that I never approached Hurricane to write about money per se. It's just a family drama in which money plays a part - as it would in any family.

Like White City Blue, Rumours is often a very funny book - but your humour is always very dark - why's that?
Because at heart, I'm a miserable bastard.

Rumours of a Hurricane is about the 80s - how did you spend the 80s?
Being miserable, being a bastard, failing in relationships, losing my mind.

You won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1999 for your novel White City Blue. How did it feel to win? Did it change your life?
Winning the Whitbread was one of the happiest moments of my life. Whether it changed my life or not I don't know, but it certainly made me more confident about my ability to write novels ( my agent originally told me to stick to
non fiction). Since that time I have got a great deal more attention from the media, and a lot more newspapers approach me to write for them. But in some ways that is a bad as well as a good thing, as I gradually get dragged
into the relatively easy and well paid work of journalism and away from my central interest which is writing novels.

Which authors influence your work?
I don't know which authors influence my work, other than to say that Rumours of a Hurricane was a deliberate attempt to create John Updike's Rabbit character for Britain.  Other than that I tend to be influenced by writers who have passion, and possibly, anger...Philip Roth springs to mind, as does Tom Wolfe...I am almost entirely influenced by American writers, I
just cant do that very distanced, elegant, hand-off writing that the English are so keen on. Apart from anything else I'm lousy at description, and I'm very impatient as a reader, so I want to get on with it.

What are you reading now?
I'm currently reading the collected non fiction of John Steinbeck (wonderful), Snobs by Julian Fellowes, (much better than you'd expect), and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann ( simply because I'm meant to be writing a piece for my Literary Journeys for the Daily Telegraph).

Could you recommend two books for readers' groups?
Two books I have greatly enjoyed in the last year are Buddha Da by Anne Donovan and Overtaken by Alexei Sayle. Both immensely enjoyable though in very different ways.


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