My people have been in this game for 25 years, and they are losing their jobs.

I think financial crisis made us all kind of wake up and see these sort of invisible currents of capital running all through our lives.

It was two scary realizations, really.

One, how little control or agency we had on an individual level.

You could have these things happening thousands of miles in America with these credit default swaps that fed all the way through the financial system, and suddenly you couldn't get a loan to run your business, and your business was going under.

And linked to that, I think there was also a scary, alarming, and a strange realization about the intangibility of a lot of financial assets.

If you're so smart why aren't you rich?

And there's an edge of that I felt has crept into British life in the last couple of decades or a bit more, that the kind of all-conquering, all-important measure of worth, of value, is to its financial and economic, and that's not true.

Is that connected at all?

No, it wasn't.

It's just the way the story came out.

I mean, I assume there's a sort of trajectory in your feelings about them, I think.

And that when you first meet Kate, I mean, slight spoiler, but Kate has this terrible bereavement very early in the book.

And it makes you feel quite close to her and there's an element of sympathy or empathy with her.

And then you gradually realise that Kate's a more complicated and darker person than you thought.

Can you just read a little bit of that, if you don't mind?

Is that connected at all?

No, it wasn't.

It's just the way the story came out.

I mean, I assume there's a sort of trajectory in your feelings about them, I think.

And that when you first meet Kate, I mean, slight spoiler, but Kate has this terrible bereavement very early in the book.

And it makes you feel quite close to her and there's an element of sympathy or empathy with her.

And then you gradually realise that Kate's a more complicated and darker person than you thought.

Can you just read a little bit of that, if you don't mind?

Why, why are you interested in vengeance? Why are you interested in retaliation? Do you think people find satisfaction in retaliation also?

I think, I think people find satisfaction in imagining it.

Um, doesn't interest me much.

I don't think I've ever tried to take revenge in my actual life.

Not that I'm, I'm not claiming to be Gandhi or Martin Luther King.

It's just I've always Believed in the...

There's a Chinese proverb that, you know, if you wait long enough by the side of the river, the body of your enemy will come floating by.

Um, can you just read a little bit of that if you don't mind?

Okay.

So this is a, a North London dinner party.

It's right at the start of the book.

"Tanya came through from the kitchen with another tray of small things on sticks, olives, chunks of pineapple.

Our eyes met.

'I'm going through a '70s thing,' she said.

'Prawn cocktail, Steak Diane, Black Forest gateau, onion soup with croutons, coq au vin, veal escalopes.

Did you plan exactly where to scatter the clues, or did something surprise you once, once you were actually drafting?

that at the top of the episode just to really draw them in.

Scoop, yeah.

They call me Scoop Lanchester.

and wildly different products in their shopping baskets.

And younger people have different spending patterns than older people.

Single people have different patterns from families.

Rural people have different patterns from urban people.

So can you talk about misunderstanding that data point and how it might inform a perfect educational solution to the ideas that we're talking about?

Three great questions.

Um, th- well, those are all very good questions.

Um, I think to take the third one f- first, um, I think I, I noticed, naming no names, but I noticed that novelists sometimes go off, and, and particular novelists with an eye for the comic.

But, and I, I, I remember thinking that w- what was happening, perhaps unfairly, but, but what was happening is if writers' careers go quite well, they can get to a point where they never have to go out, and they don't have to interact with the world, and they can just go to their desk every day and write and kind of the walls can close in a bit.

I remember thinking I didn't want that to happen, and I did want to keep as engaged with the world as I possibly could for as long as possible, just because it would kind of keep the windows open.

Keep literally looking out the window.

Um, and that that's, for the kind of books I like to write, that was important.

[laughs]

Tell us about that part of your life.

Yeah.

Well, I, um-- it's one of the things that, um, you know, you don't realize you're actually living through a specific historic epoch until you live through it and look back.

Um, so went to start at university in 1981.

By that point, if you wanted to work in journalism, it was still a closed shop.

You had to get, um, accredited through...

I think there were two places.

Um, but can you kind of trace the, the way in which your career has worked from a financial point of view?

because of the e- you know, the economic threat.

That's definitely the case.

And one of the reasons we know that's true is that when there's a financial crisis, there was a thing in, you know, 2008/9, suddenly the rules were a lot more lax, you know, when banks were worried about running out of money.

There was a, a deliberate lowering of, not so much a lowering of standards, but a conscious effort to not ask inconvenient questions.

There's a...

I've forgotten the name of it.

There's a John le Carré novel about it.

I mean, how often do, do innocent people get caught up in the nets, as it were?