India, April 10 -- One of the three central characters in your book is Lolita Devi. Why did you use that name and how has Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita influenced your understanding of subverting readers' expectations from a character?

I might have subconsciously wished to challenge readers with the name 'Lolita'! I wanted to tell the story of the collapse of the DDR (and the Soviet Union) from the perspective of people from what we now call the Global South. I suppose having a character called Lolita challenges Western perspectives of the power of the name - is it now verboten to use it? Can it only be used to index objectification and illicitness? I think not. A young woman will always be at risk of being objectified, whatever her name. It...