Tana, I found the idea of the 'animal' in Broken Harbour extremely chilling and a superb metaphor for mental illness and/or depression, but also loved the ambiguity of it (we can never be quite sure that the animal didn't exist - what about the skeletons in the attic?). Could you please tell us how you came up with the idea of the animal, and whether this ambiguity was intentional? Thanks!

Tana French Thank you :-) The animal is actually where the whole idea for Broken Harbour came from. Basically, a few years back we had mice. One evening I saw a small black thing flash across our cooker, and I jumped and yelled - but by the time my now-husband got there, it was gone, and he was a little sceptical about whether there had been anything there to begin with (Hey, it's great that you have a such a good imagination, and that you actually manage to get paid for it, but you might want to dial it down just a notch...). A couple of nights later he saw one of them, I managed to restrain myself from pointing and laughing like Nelson Muntz, we got mousetraps and that was the end of that. But I started thinking - what if that happened within a relationship that was already under all kinds of pressure - financial, emotional, practical, etc? And what if the second partner never saw the mouse, and the first one had to keep trying to convince him or her that the thing actually existed?

And yes, the ambiguity was intentional. As a reader, I like books that don't spell everything out for me - that leave me to make some decisions about the book for myself. These are the books I feel closest to. So I tend to do the same thing in the books I write.

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