My publishers, Penguin Random House, have offices on the Vauxhall Bridge Road, the other side of Victoria. It’s an odd part of London. Considering that the River Thames is at the top of the road and Tate Britain is just around the corner, it’s surprisingly shabby and unattractive, full of shops that look as if they should have gone out of business decades ago and blocks of flats with too many windows and no views. The road itself is very straight and unusually wide, with four lanes for the traffic that rushes past like dust in the vacuum tube of a hoover. There are side streets but they don’t seem to go anywhere.
I don’t get invited there all that often. Producing a book is a complicated enough business, I suppose, without the author getting in the way, but actually I look forward to every visit. It takes me about eight months to finish a book and in that time I’m completely alone. It’s one of the paradoxes of being a writer that, physically, there’s not a huge difference between the debut novelist and the international best-seller: they’re each stuck in a room with a laptop, too many Jaffa Cakes and nobody to talk to. I once worked out that I’ve probably written more than ten million words in my lifetime. I’m surrounded by silence but at the same time I’m drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.
