This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.