Before two lovers meet

Maggie O'Farrell The Distance Between Us (Headline, 1st March, h/b, £14.99, 0755302656)

Like her début, After You'd Gone, and her follow-up My Lover's Lover, Maggie O'Farrell's third novel explores the psychology of love and family. The book has an unusual structure: its two central characters—Stella, a young woman who flees an obsessively close relationship with her sister and goes to work in a café in a remote part of Scotland, and Jake, a married man who has grown up in Hong Kong with his traveller mother—do not meet until late in the novel.

"I thought when I started that this would be a very slim novella, but it grew and grew and it's the longest one yet. In atmosphere and the way it's written, it's similar to After You'd Gone; I'm more comfortable with a non-chronological, slightly chaotic way of writing.

"I've always been fascinated by families and probably always will be. Creating your own family [O'Farrell recently had a son] is exciting but also very nervewracking, because I think families are fantastic things but they are also a crucible of many different personalities so a lot goes on within them. Families explain so much about who you are and why you are who you are. Even if you leave and go to the other end of the world, you're shaped by it.

"I am interested in the idea of that kind of exclusivity between sisters: that within your relationship they can drive you mad, but the minute anybody criticises them you are instantly on the defensive—nobody else is allowed to criticise your sister. It's that clannishness that fascinates me. Against all odds you would do anything for someone of your own blood.

"I like the idea of having two main characters who don't meet until half-way through the book, who lead parallel lives. What I hope is that the reader all the way through will think, 'They are obviously going to collide, but how will it happen, and what will happen when they do?'

"I am interested in what makes people move around the world, and leave and arrive, come back or not come back, the problems and attractions of going away. I love travelling but there is always that slight oxymoron of it, that when you're travelling you want to be at home, but when you're at home you want to get away.

"Because the novel is quite disparate geographically I did a lot of research. I lived in Hong Kong for a year after I left college, and I was in two minds about whether I should go back to it, but I did. It was amazing, it's very weird going back to a place where you spent a certain period of your life. I kept thinking I would bump into my 21-year-old self. Another part of the novel is set on the Scottish coast, somewhere where my family used to go on holiday every year, the most beautiful place in the world.

"And I spent quite a long time in southern Italy, where a lot of the Edinburgh Italians came from. It's incredibly difficult to get to that area unless you take a lot of buses and hire a car, and everyone was very shocked to see me. It was high and wild and cold even though it was summertime and there was no one there. A man said to me, 'They've all gone to Scozia', and I felt like saying, 'I know, I've seen them!'"