6) One of the elements I've always been particularly fond of when it comes to your work, has been the almost opulence of your language. It lends a splendour to events, but it also seems to elevate everything above the mundane. Even in contemporary times you have a way of making the words splendid. Was this style inspired by anyone in particular, is it even something you're aware of doing?

Tricky question. Certainly not a linguistic attempt to echo anyone else. In Fionavar I did (as I said before) think in terms of operatic rhythms, the tale rising to and moving away from major arias, duets … and I used mythic, Biblical cadences to try to achieve that (lacking, obviously, music!) in such scenes. The language in the later books has varied as I try to fit it to the setting. The language in Last Light, for example, is harder, terser, less lyric than the books before (and some reviewers and scholars have commented on this).

7) This was my not so subtle way of trying to lead into your latest release - Ysabel which is just out in Canada and due out for release in the U.S. in Feb, right?

As I type, some stores have jumped the gun and it is already on sale in Canada. It’ll be in the US by early February, in the UK by March. There are a plethora of early reviews online already, off the advance review copies … the book business has changed greatly in this regard, influenced by the Internet, shifting more towards a model like the film world, with teasers and trailers and rumours going on for months and months before actual release.

8) Ysabel is your first book set entirely in the contemporary world, and it also features as its protagonist a 15-year-old (Ned). Why, and why to the first two, and was it a coincidence that your first entirely contemporary book would have a teenaged hero?

The broad answer you can guess from what I’ve said above: I keep wanting to test myself as a writer, try something different, see what emerges. One reason for a younger protagonist is that when I was writing Last Light I was conscious of working with very young and much older central figures, and my readings in history made clear that those very young people could play major roles in a society. In ours, we keep teenagers (and twenty-somethings, too, I suppose) remarkably youthful, unfledged. I wanted to do some inner dialogue in the book around that point. I’ve always enjoyed a bildungsroman, a coming of age book, have been irked (slightly) by the emerging assumption that any such book is YA … it simply isn’t so, from Goethe to Dickens to Twain to How Green Was My Valley.