So how did you come up with the, the different characters?

[laughs] Well, I, I think as with many writers, it's, it's a bit of a photo fit, a composite, uh, between the people you may have met throughout your life, uh, you may have seen, you may have invented, uh, colored and filled out by those characters of your imagination.

So most of them are made up of my imagined scenarios, which imbue the individual with that personality.

I once, uh, was walking along one of the streets here and met a lady who had worked in one of the factories.

So I was able to take her experiences and really imbue that into the challenges of Esme, one of the key characters within the book, and to talk about her experiences working in the factory and the, the hardship and the difficulty, uh, around that job and the position of people who had less compared to the aristocracy who remained.

And how did you weave the books and, and bookshops into the story?

[laughs] So literature and books are very much at the foundation of this.

Uh, I think if there was a theme in the book I would love to have communicated, it would be that books promote communication, conciliation, discussion, and even differences.