As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.

It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one’s judgement.

When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.