India, June 14 -- 1How did you conceive of Caledonian Road, and its wide cast of characters? I had been thinking about this book for a long time. I lived in Kings Cross in the 1990s, when I was in my 20s, and I was always overwhelmed by London as a place: a multiplicity of human beings from all over the world, their varied economic statuses, life experiences, and this multifarious, multicultural road, Caledonian Road, stretching up through North London, that really interested me. I realised if I could tell the story of the people who lived around that road, then I'd have a new kind of novel about London. And that it would have a relationship with the Dickensian novel, the Victorian novel. So, it's a big social novel that I tried to put onto the page: the rich, the poor, the domestic, and the foreign; men, women, and children from different backgrounds. That's what I wanted in this book. It took me 10 years to research and write it. 2At the beginning of the novel, there is the sentence: "Oh, the progress of guilt and vanity in the average white liberal today." Were you trying to capture the anxieties of a male artist in post-Brexit UK? I think that liberal white men in Western society have had a very difficult decade. And I speak as one, by the way; I speak autobiographically. I am a middle-aged, middle-class, white, liberal man. And we've had a difficult 10 years because we've been challenged on everything that we used to think was religious. We thought we were on the right side of history. We thought we were arguing for equality and decency. We thought we were on the side of the underdog. As it turns out, we have been part of the problem all along. Perhaps we have made a lot of noise about equality, but have we actually contributed much to it? Have we given up any of our privileges? Have we distributed our wealth? No, right? The white liberal in Western society is not the enemy of this book, but he's equally responsible for the complexity of the situation. This novel certainly questions the people on the right wing, but it also asks: Why not question the people on the left? Because society is a mess and it's not all just down to one faction. Intolerance and virtue-sig-nalling have been a huge problem on the left as well as on the right, so I was thinking of that too, with this book. 3Where do you see your novel in terms of the spectrum of London-centric books that you may have enjoyed reading? I loved Bleak House, Dickens's great book. I also loved Our Mutual Friend, another great book by Charles Dickens. I'd be happy if Caledonian Road took a modest place next to the books that have been written about London over the last few hundred years, which have tried to capture the moment. Because this isn't a book about an unchanged city. This is a new London. Dickens would not recognise the London that I have tried to capture in this book....