Goodreads asked Alan R.M. Thrush:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Alan R.M. Thrush I subscribe to the idea that the current circumstances of any person's life are the sum of key choices he or she has made throughout it. I like this idea that we are responsible for who we are and where we are because we made the choice; we made the decision. Yet this argument ignores the impact of fate – and by fate I mean the twists and turns in Life’s passage over which we have no control because the decision or choice was taken not by us, but for us: Your boss tells you to postpone that appointment you made with a client in Twin Towers for 9/11 and you live. But for your boss’s decision you would have died. This is an extreme example, but this is what I mean by fate. So I don’t think that my own life holds any special mystery that could form the plot of a particularly good book, no more so than the mysteries in any other man’s life. Life itself is the mystery, and all good novels are revelations of what happens in the moments of crisis that occur in all people’s lives – the choices that they make in those moments and the consequences of those choices.

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