We are what our stories have made us.

Even after people lose faith in God or in each other, they still see themselves linked to some past. It is difficult to visualise looking upon oneself as existing in a vacuum. We all want to be connected somewhere, to some geniality. Yet in contemporary existence, the emptiness is getting more and more starkly present, and neither God nor human relationships seem to grip us enough.

At this time it is necessary for us to link ourselves to the past: to our forebears, our own people, to those without whom we wouldn’t be here. Fiction of the past, our past, and the past of mankind has the potential to link us up with our people, our ancestors and make us see how we became ourselves. Hence it is necessary to distinguish between fiction of contemporary experience and fiction of the past. It is the latter which may indeed hold the panacea, as that links us to our roots. When I wrote The Tailor’s Needle I seem to have had some such aim in mind. I wanted to take the reader back to the time when people were a little more rooted and connected. Fiction makes you enter a world and then live in it as though you were contemporary to another time. My novel can probably offer that kind of help. At least I hope it can.