How to write a novel
The settings of all three of my novels – a remote British Columbian island, a genteel Boston suburb and a Victorian Gothic manor in Sussex – appear to have nothing in common. But what links them is an underlying feeling: isolation. My books are about how people behave in unsettling or threatening situations, and a strong sense of exposure is key. Places aren’t just the backdrop against which characters act out the plot, they create the mood of a book. They are a pulse that feeds everything else.