India, Aug. 30 -- The South was originally conceived as an 800-page epic, but you felt something "hypermasculine about writing a book like that". In writing a novel that deals with a mix of celebrated and looked-down-upon masculinities, how were you able to ascertain within yourself a dormant masculinity in aspiring to execute a feat like that? Such realisations often escape artists? How did you rethink The South as part of a quartet?

It was easy. When I first started writing what would become The South, I realised very quickly that I didn't have the ego required to write a huge weighty epic, a very male kind of ego, which involves believing that you know how people intersect with history over a long sweep of time; how history plays out ...