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Discworld’s creator on his new novel, living with Alzheimer’s – and why he should be allowed to decide when to end it all

When, not very long ago, Terry Pratchett’s father was given a year to live, Pratchett père took it, on the whole, philosophically. Father and son had plenty of time to “have those conversations that you have with a dying parent”, and to reminisce about his father’s time in India during the war. At one point, said Pratchett, in last year’s Dimbleby lecture, his father suddenly said, “‘I can feel the sun of India on my face,’ and his face did light up rather magically, brighter and happier than I had seen it at any time in the previous year. If there had been any justice or even narrative sensibility in the universe, he would have died there and then, shading his eyes from the sun of Karachi.”

If the universe refused to display narrative sensibility, then Pratchett Jr would: that moment returns early in his new novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, in which a gruff, essentially kindly old man is vouchsafed a vision of youth and sunlight (though, instead of Karachi, the sunbeams glint off a leaping hare) and expires as he describes it. Even Pratchett knows this is a tad too neat, however, so, this being Discworld, his fantasy kingdom on a flat planet sailing through space on the backs of four elephants who in turn stand on a giant turtle, Death makes a lugubrious wisecrack about it: “WASN’T THAT APPROPRIATE?”

Pratchett, when he arrives at his idyllic local pub in Wiltshire, turns out to be full of this type of humour – deliberate, slightly coercive, very self-aware. He seems a man used to being listened to: his sentences unspool evenly, sometimes a shade irascibly, from beginning to end, often as anecdotes topped and tailed and full of random facts, gloried in for their own sake – annual expenditure on farmers’ boots in the 19th century; the ubiquity then of shoe trees; did you know that in Victorian England, most of the women read and most of the men didn’t?

Partly, though, this is because he’s been writing all morning: I Shall Wear Midnight, a young adult novel, was launched in central London at midnight on Tuesday, but, as has been the way throughout a career that has so far produced 50 novels (38 of them set on Discworld) and generated more than 65m book sales – Pratchett is already 60,000 words into the next book.

And for the last two and a half years, ever since he was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s, and lost the physical ability to write, he has dictated those words into voice-recognition software. At first, in fact, he talks to me about the machine as if I am a machine (which is not entirely unwarranted: there is a tape recorder sitting on the table between us). “. . . And the nice thing is, contrary to what you might initially expect, comma” – we both burst out laughing – “yes, sorry about this, full stop.”

Pratchett has announced that his new book will be the last in his Tiffany Aching series (Aching is a young witch), and the novel, a bridge between childhood and the adult world, is full of worldly darkness – death, domestic abuse, old women’s corpses being eaten by their pets, depression. “I’m a fantasy writer,” he says. “Called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in I Shall Wear Midnight, which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.”

Aching is, in effect, a young social worker, and much of her supposedly witchy wisdom comes simply from being near to people in the moments when others are not, or from making mistakes. At one point, in exasperation, she gets her familiars, the Nac Mac Feegles, to whizz around a depressed woman’s very messy kitchen and clean it up – succeeding only in terrifying her.

“Tiffany’s parents got it right,” says Pratchett, sounding for all the world like a promoter of Cameron’s Big Society: “mobilise the village to deal with [somebody like that].” Aching has First Sight and Second Sight (and occasionally third and fourth) – but they are, respectively, “seeing what’s really there, rather than what you want to see,” and “thinking about what you are thinking”: self-awareness by other names.

Pratchett knows there are strict rules about making things so dark when you are writing for children – “a child’s instinctive grasp of narrativium [sic] is that this has got to end well” – but he is also very clear that, while his witch can take away physical pain (she draws it out into a ball, then dumps it), she cannot, and will not, take loss, sadness, or grief.

“I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff,” says Pratchett. “That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‘unhappy is the family that contains an author’?”

He doesn’t say it in so many words, but that must also be combined with grief for the loss of his ability to write longhand, or type with anything other than one finger at a time (although, weirdly, he is still perfectly able to sign his name — “the bit that knows how to sign my name is an entirely different bit of the brain”); the grief of knowing that while he may have years yet, most of his other mental faculties will go the same way. But probably not suddenly.

“Every day must be a tiny, incrementally . . . incremental . . . incremental . . . – he stumbled over a word; you must write that one down,” Pratchett says with a dark, almost-laugh. (Having been a journalist himself, before becoming a PR in the nuclear industry and thence a novelist, he rarely passes up a chance to remind you that he knows how journalists work) “. . . incremental . . . change on the day before. So what is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

“The last test I did was the first where I wasn’t as good as the previous time. I actually forgot David Cameron. I just blanked on him” – this time the laugh contains, what – a kind of ironic approval? “What happens is, I call it the ball bearing. It’s there, it just hasn’t gone into the slot.” He cannot begin to do tests that require him to scribble shapes, but asked to list names of animals, “I industriously say more than you can possibly imagine” – you can just see the pleasure of the earnest nerd in school – “and we go on for a little while until she smiles and says, ‘Yes, we know, we know.’

“And then there was the time with dear Claudia with the Germanic accent – which is always good if someone’s interrogating you – and she said, ‘What would you do with a hammer? And I said, ‘If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning. I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land.’ And by the end I was dancing around the room, with her laughing. The laugh will be on the other foot, eventually, and I’m aware of that. But it shows how different things can be: I can still handle the language well, I can play tricks with it and all the other stuff – but I have to think twice when I put my pants on in the morning.”

How does it change his sense of self? “Well – no one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes. I think – this is going to follow me for ages – I’m open to moments of joy: the other day, it was just a piece of rusty barbed wire in the hedge. Something had grown over it, and the whole pattern, the different shades of brown, the red – everything made a superb construction. And I was just happy that I’d seen it. But then I think – and it may just be because I’m 62 – it’s also made me more . . . cynical? About government. And more sure, which is why I’m doing the Dignity in Dying.”

For nearly as long as he has been public about his illness, Pratchett has been public about his wish to choose when he goes, and his puzzlement that British law does not see the sense of his position. “I feel embarrassed that people from this country have to go, cap in hand, to die in Switzerland. Apart from anything else, it makes it a rich man’s – or a soon to be much poorer man’s – possibility.” And people have to go earlier than they intended. “Exactly.”

He has a lot of time for the law in Oregon, where doctors can give a terminally ill patient a “potion to take when life gets too bad. I believe something like 40% or more of the patients die without taking it. Which means that every day they’re thinking, ‘Hmmmm – today’s worth living.’ And then one day they don’t, and they die. That seems to me a very human thing, and a very good thing, because they can think, ‘OK, that’s sorted, I’ve got the potion, now I can get on and try and get the most out of life.’”

Ideally, Pratchett would like things to be even more official than that: there should be tribunals – here he leans forward, looking intently at me over his glasses – of mental health professionals, lawyers etc, all over the age of 45, who would question the patient and try to ascertain that no one was coercing them, and that the choice was not “a passing fixation”.

But that’s incredibly difficult; in illness you’re often dealing with depression. “Yes. Yes, I know. I know,” he says impatiently. Of course he knows. “Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect. But anything is better than some poor half of a couple in some house, devising something with ropes and pulleys, saying, ‘If he pulls this and we use that . . .’ – that’s obscene.”

Currently, that half of the couple can, in theory, be prosecuted for murder. At least with a tribunal, “it would mean that whoever is left behind is at somewhat less risk – they’re probably still at some risk, but at least there would be some proof that the situation was there.”

Part of me wonders if the publicness of Pratchett’s discussions might, on some level, be trying to achieve this too – getting us to act as an unwitting tribunal and witnesses, if or when the need arises. What does Lyn, his wife of more than 40 years, think of all this? “I think my wife takes the view that . . . Actually, I think in her heart of hearts she takes the view that a hand will come out of the sky with a big flask, saying, ‘Just the stuff you were after.’ I think she takes the view that, um . . . that she would look after me. And I have not said to her – I have absolutely not said to her – ‘I want you to do this, or I want you to do that.’” What about his daughter (Rhianna, 33, a successful games scriptwriter and, as she describes herself on her website, “general narrative paramedic”)? “My daughter thinks, ‘If Dad wants it, that’s OK.’ I don’t think she has any particular interest in seeing me lying there like a baby.”

That was certainly the way he felt about his own father. It was even, it seems, something his father wanted. Had it been legal, Pratchett says, and “if he could have sat up in bed and said goodbye, I’d have pressed the button. I wouldn’t have been able to see for crying, but I would have considered that a duty.”

• I Shall Wear Midnight is published by Doubleday at £18.99. To order a copy for £14.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

• This article was amended on 2 September 2010. The original referred to Nac Nac Feegles. This has been corrected.

In the fourth in our series of interviews with authors longlisted for the Guardian children’s fiction prize, Michelle Pauli talks Theresa Breslin about writing historical fiction for a modern audience

Historical fiction for teens may not be as in vogue as vampires right now, but for Theresa Breslin, the stories the past inspires can seem just as fantastical. The Carnegie-winning Scottish author has written more than 30 children’s books, many of them tackling serious contemporary subjects such as bullying – but, recently it has been characters from centuries gone that have caught her imagination.

Her latest novel, Prisoner of the Inquisition, which has been longlisted for the Guardian children’s fiction prize, is set in 15th-century Spain. It was a time of tumult for the country: the throne was divided between two monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon; Tomás de Torquemada, the architect of the Spanish Inquisition, was at the height of his powers; and Christopher Columbus was about to set sail across the Atlantic.

“It was almost too good to be true,” says Breslin, laughing down the phone from her home in Scotland. “If you had orchestrated this as a fiction story and gone to an editor saying, I’ve got a magnificent queen who was intent on reunifying the country, endless religious upheaval and an explorer, they would have said it was a bit much. But, of course, it’s all fact.”

Prisoner of the Inquisition is narrated alternately by two teenagers, Zarita and Saulo, whose lives first connect when privileged, naive Zarita, daughter of a wealthy town magistrate, accuses Saulo’s father, a beggar, of touching her in a church. He is killed and Saulo escapes, secretly pledging to take his revenge on Zarita and her family. His side of the story encompasses slavery at sea, an encounter with pirates and a burgeoning friendship with Christopher Columbus. Meanwhile, Zarita sees her life change completely as a result of shifts within her family and the impact of a much wider political force: the Inquisition. The two finally meet again at the court of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in the Moorish city of Granada, in a nail-biting showdown.

In synopsis, it may indeed sound “a bit much”. But, as in Breslin’s other historical novels, which cover the first world war, Catherine de Medici, Leonardo da Vinci and the Borgia dynasty, the story is firmly grounded by her extensive research into the way people lived and loved during the period.

Readers can safely lose themselves in Breslin’s stories with full confidence that, while she may be weaving a fictional tale with fictional characters around real people who lived hundreds of years ago, the underlying historical base is sound. Her dedication to the period is borne out by the passion with which she talks about her lengthy research process.

“What I try to do – and I think this is the former librarian in me – is to get primary source material,” she explains. “For instance, with Remembrance [Breslin's novel about the first world war, seen from a teenage perspective], I looked at an original journal reporting the Battle of the Somme that says ‘we’re winning and it’s a glorious battle’. I also studied a military record of the men that were killed and what happened to the battalions. It all helps to let you know what people are thinking.”

But it’s the smaller, personal touches that bring Breslin’s historical worlds back to life. For these, she researches how people dressed, played, ate – and drank. “In the middle ages they must have been half-cut half the time,” she laughs. “They couldn’t really drink the water. It was too dangerous, so they would drink mead instead.”

She also touches on the importance of clothes as a marker of how people are feeling. In Remembrance, a moment of light relief amid the misery of the trenches is provided by a discussion on hem lengths.

In Prisoner, meanwhile, Zarita puts on her nun’s garb when she reaches her lowest ebb. She feels a sense of freedom as she pulls the hood down, puts her hands into the sleeves and sinks back into herself without distraction. The habit might be made of rough grey wool, but the character observes: “It comforted me more than if I were wearing lace and brocade … I was cocooned from the outside world.”

Yet, winnowing through libraries can only take a writer so far. “Ultimately, I really have to go there,” she says. “Really, truly, it’s not just an indulgence to get away from a Scottish winter. You need to go there and see the flowers in Andalucia, smell the sea, feel the sun on your feet when you walk through the palace of Alhambra.”

Travelling on location also led her to discover snippets of history she would never otherwise have come across. Isabella’s tomb in Granada revealed a clue about the queen’s (accurate) estimation of her intelligence, compared with her consort’s.

A helpful guide in the Hall of the Sultans, meanwhile, pointed out a secret gallery where the Sultan’s female relatives would have been able to peer to keep an eye on proceedings. This discovery inspired a crucial scene in the story.

Visiting the location where the book would be set also led Breslin to question how to tackle more gruesome events of the period (specifically the acts of the Inquisition) in a book for teens. The depictions of the techniques employed by the inquisitors horrified her. “There was one museum I had to walk out of,” she says. “It was horrific.”

Consequently, while there are torture scenes in the book, with enough detail to make a weak-stomached reader wince, they avoid gratuitousness. For Breslin, though, it remained important to retain some details of the practices of the time in order to maintain what she calls “truth”.

“At the end Zarita is crying not just for Spain and for humanity, but also for herself, because she is going to be racked,” she says. “I think if I hadn’t shown a bit of the factual thing, that wouldn’t be convincing. In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.”

Bresling adds: “Remembrance was the same. It was barbaric, but if you sanitise it, it’s not true. Equally if you gloss over it, it’s not true. How do you handle it? It was very difficult to show what was happening and the effects it would have on someone’s spirit – not just their body – and deliver that truth.”

Remembrance kicked off Breslin’s move to historical fiction when she told her editor she wanted to write “something about world war one from a teenager’s point of view, because it’s going to be the war of the previous century”. Her editor was doubtful.

Following that success, Breslin said the historical figure she really wanted to write about was da Vinci. Again there were doubts. “It was in the days before Dan Brown and my editor said ‘do you really think people would be interested in da Vinci?’” says Breslin, chuckling.

She won’t drop too many clues about her next book, except to say that “it’s another historical queen” (and no, it’s not Elizabeth). It’s safe to say that Breslin’s editor is unlikely to be doubtful this time.

VS Naipaul is often blinkered but he still sees things in Africa that others miss, says Aminatta Forna

In 2001, when the Swedish Academy awarded Sir Vidia Naipaul the Nobel prize in literature, it described him as the heir to Joseph Conrad: “The annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings… the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.” There are plenty who would have begged to disagree, for Naipaul has regularly attracted criticism, from Edward Said among others, for his dismissive remarks on the cultures of his native Trinidad, on Islam, Pakistan and more.

The Masque of Africa is his latest – quite likely last – full-length work of non-fiction. It is a quest through the continent for the spirit of African belief, the belief systems that preceded the arrival of Christianity and Islam – which is very much in keeping with the legacy of Joseph Conrad, who is referenced several times in the book. Already this feels cliched and tiresome; one yearns for the day when an author from outside can approach Africa without invoking the “heart of darkness” mythology. In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay attacking Conrad’s best-known work as racist and already the novelist Robert Harris has described The Masque of Africa as “toxic”.

Naipaul’s journey across the continent takes him from Uganda, where he lived for a short while in the 1960s, to Nigeria, then to Gabon via the Ivory Coast and Ghana, and finally to South Africa. Along the way, he meets and talks to people about their beliefs. His sources are virtually all African rather than aid workers and expats (you’d be surprised how rare this is).

Naipaul discourses with teachers, writers, academics, pharmacists, kings, queens and chiefs, businessmen, friends of friends. That there exists an African intellectual class does not escape him. His sources navigate the complexities and conflicts of their own culture and are able to describe what they have lost with the passing of the old religions. They negotiate their cultural worlds, understand which rules can be broken and which cannot.

They can be playful, something more literal minded western writers often fail to grasp, for when it comes to Africa humour is the first casualty. Naipaul gets it. He is dry, often irked, sometimes enraged. He is quite rude. But he is also patient (not a trait often associated with him), engaged, funny, self-reflective and thoughtful.

In Uganda, Susan, a poet, has a love-hate relationship with her “Christian” name: “When a person or race comes and imposes on you, it takes away everything and it is a vicious thing to do. Much as I think the west and modernity is a good thing, it did take away our culture and civilisations.” Frantz Fanon said the same thing in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth in the 1950s and early 60s. But there’s more. Habib, a wealthy businessman raised as a Muslim, was taught to despise the African religions, something that now angers him. “It was a tool to control our African mind. It is how the imperialists worked.” Naipaul is surprised to learn that Habib includes the Islamic world in that. It is a theme that recurs in country after country, as Naipaul notes competing mosques and evangelical churches. The battle for African minds and souls is still on.

His is a stately, chauffeured progress, though frequently upon rutted roads. Once, when Naipaul’s legs give out on the long walk to see the bones of ancestors in Gabon, helpful locals persuade him into a wheelbarrow. Naipaul finds the elderly wheelbarrow insufficient to the task and clambers out. He finds Africa a struggle. Journeys are almost always longer than he is told; he is kept waiting; diviners all demand to be paid; there is rubbish everywhere; the temperatures are intolerable.

It all begins well enough. In east Africa, he explores the ancient kingdom of Buganda, admires the straight roads. In the neighbouring kingdom of Toro, the (British-built) roads curve. He meets the Queen Mother of Toro, who is “full of bounce”. He retains his sense of humour in Nigeria, a place where many have been known to lose theirs. His hotel room is unsatisfactory: “The people at the desk began to send me zipping up and down, from floor to floor and room to unsuitable room. It began to seem that a gratuity was called for.”

He recounts all this in writing shorn of excess, sentences short to the point of abruptness, and he has a wicked way with syntax. After a farcical exit from Lagos airport, he is finally installed in a decent room when the phone rings: “The caller was impatient, on the brink of rage.” It is a driver still waiting at the airport to collect him.

In Nigeria, he hears spirit legends from the Oba of Lagos, meets the Ooni of Ife and the Oba of Osun, of whom he seeks permission to see the sacred groves. The Oba is accompanied by his wife, the power behind the throne, Naipaul is told. “She considered us one by one. And I felt she liked us.” Permission is granted; the grove takes Naipaul’s breath away.

By Ghana, though, Naipaul is beginning to have a hard time of it. The poor Ghanaians suffer his ire, perhaps because he discovers they eat cats in the south of the country; Naipaul is a big cat lover. His Ghanaian guide, Richmond (a cynical and somewhat self-loathing African), tells him they are killed by being dropped alive into boiling water. Naipaul doesn’t care for the Gaa, who make him nervous. He bolts from a meeting with the high priest.

Things go further downhill in Ivory Coast, where they eat cats too. He doesn’t take to the Ivorians at all – cat eaters, elephant killers, forest wreckers – though he does find beauty in the oft-mocked basilica built by the country’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a replica of St Peter’s in Rome, only bigger. By Gabon, he has recovered some of his equilibrium, and it is here, in the forests, that he finds something akin to Africa’s true spirituality.

Where Naipaul does both Africa and himself a disservice is in failing to verify much of his information. Somehow, when it comes to Africa, rigour flies out of the window. Naipaul talks of rituals performed using human body parts. Neither Naipaul nor we know if any of this is true. I would treat it with scepticism, as sorcerers famously like to big themselves up by creating a culture of fear. If locals are turning to magic (which they may well be), it is perhaps because such beliefs the world over are the last resort of the poor, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed – in short, those with no other way to change their lives. It is only in South Africa, where the legacy of apartheid proves enduring and unavoidable, and where the sangoma’s hollow promises find ever more seekers willing to believe, that Naipaul comes close to this understanding.

In another section of the book, he takes at face value a story about the ritual killing of hundreds of people for the funeral of President Houphouët-Boigny. The source is “foreign (but well-placed)”. Here the old antennae should be twitching, for there is only one source less credible than a “witch doctor” and that’s the “old Africa hand” out to impress a new arrival. Such people exploit the eagerness of outsiders to believe Africans are capable of the very worst.

The Masque of Africa is a book for outsiders, for those who may never visit Africa or may know it only superficially. But it is also a book in which Africans themselves may find something to learn. Naipaul is a difficult, imperfect narrator who does not care to be liked, but he is an honest one and doesn’t dissemble. Somehow, by the end of it all, and despite his best efforts, I had grown to like him.

Aminatta Forna’s novels include The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones.

The Israeli writer discusses his novel To the End of the Land, a memorial to his son who was killed while serving in the army, and why he remains an opponent of his country’s policy towards the Palestinians

In May 2003, David Grossman, one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, began writing a new book. It was to be about what the Israelis euphemistically call “the Situation”, which was a little odd because, for the past decade, he’d carefully avoided writing about politics, in his stories, if not his journalism. It was not just that he’d long felt that almost anything he could say had already been said by one side or the other. There was the danger that such a story, even in his deft hands, would be creaky and polemical. Now, though, he felt suddenly that he couldn’t not write about it. Grossman’s eldest son, Yonatan, was six months from completing his military service and his younger son, Uri, was 18 months from beginning it. His feelings about this – in Israel, men serve three years – were so acute, it seemed they would push the pen over the paper for him.

The story came quickly. It would be about a middle-aged woman, Ora, whose son, Ofer, only just released from army service, has voluntarily returned to the frontline for an offensive against one of Israel’s many enemies. Ora, having moved from celebration to renewed fearfulness in a matter of hours, is in danger of losing her mind. She has no idea how she will get through the next weeks or months. Then, in a fit of magical thinking, it comes to her. She will mount a pre-emptive strike of her own. She will simply go away, absent herself from her home and her life. That way, she reasons, she will not be there when the army “notifiers” come to tell her of her son’s death. And if she is not there, perhaps he will not die. After all, how can a person be dead if his mother isn’t at home to receive the news of it?

Grossman started writing and as he did, he, too, indulged in a little magical thinking. He had the feeling – or perhaps it was just a fervent hope – that the novel would keep Uri safe. Every time Uri came home on leave, they would discuss the story, what was new in the characters’ lives. “What did you do to them this week?” Uri used to ask. He also fed his father useful military details. This went on for a long time and it seemed for a while as if the charm was working. But on 12 July 2006, following Hezbollah attacks on Israeli soldiers on patrol near the Lebanese border, war broke out. Over the course of the next 34 days, 165 Israelis (121 of them soldiers), an estimated 500 Hezbollah fighters and 1,191 Lebanese civilians were killed.

Grossman was terrified for his son, a tank commander, but he was not, at first, opposed to the war. Though a determined lefty as far as Palestine goes – he is against the occupation of Palestinian territories – he believed that Israel had a right to defend itself against Hezbollah which, unlike the majority of Palestinians, is committed solely to destroying Israel. As the weeks went on, however, he began to think that Israel should show more restraint. At the beginning of August, together with two other great Israeli writers, Amos Oz and AB Yehoshua, Grossman appeared at a press conference in Tel Aviv, demanding that the government negotiate a ceasefire. “We had a right to go to war,” he said. “But things got complicated… I believe that there is more than one course of action available.” He did not mention that his own son was on the frontline. It was not relevant. He would have felt exactly the same had Uri been safely at home.

The Israeli government eventually accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire which came into effect on 14 August. But this was too late for Grossman and his family. On 12 August, in the dying hours of the war, Uri, who was just 20 years old, was killed when his tank was hit by a rocket; he and his crew, who were killed with him, were trying to rescue soldiers from another tank. The notifiers came to Grossman’s house at 2.40am. He heard the voice over the intercom, and he knew what was coming. Between his bedroom and the front door, he decided: “That’s it – life’s over.” But the strange thing is, it was not. The Grossmans buried Uri; his father’s simple but piercing eulogy was reprinted in newspapers around the world, including the Observer; and then the family sat shiva (a period of mourning during which time a Jewish family receives visitors).

The day after the shiva ended, Grossman returned to his book. “I went back to it for an hour,” he says, surprise registering on his face even now. “Then I had to come back home. But the next day, I added 10 minutes, and the day after that, another ten. Yes, it was hard. I was going straight to the place that frightened me most. On the other hand, it was the only possible place for me.” The result – To the End of the Land – was published in Israel in 2008 and arrives here, in the most beautiful translation, this week. What can I tell you about this book? I’m not sure. Only that I loved it. And that it tears at your heart. And that when I heard someone comparing Grossman with Tolstoy, and his novel with War and Peace, I did not scoff.

It is blazing hot in Jerusalem and, as usual, the city is a knot: tight with anger, cinched with frustration. The traffic is so heavy, it takes a taxi 20 minutes or more to move a single kilometre, but walk to your destination, as I’ve just done, and your dress will be sopping wet, the straps of your sandals will have flayed your feet like whips. Forget the holy sites, the bearded priests and the shawled rabbis. On a day like today, the visitor seeks the blessing only air conditioning can bestow: cool, crisp and calming.

I meet Grossman in a coffee shop in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, a venerable Jewish neighbourhood just outside the Old City walls. The view from the window is of a pomegranate tree, the Hagia Maria Sion, formerly known as the Abbey of the Dormition, where the Virgin Mary is said to have fallen into eternal sleep and, following the curve of the next hill, the sombre grey line of the barrier that separates the citizens of Jerusalem from those of the West Bank.

The room is deliciously cold, (goosebumps are already rising on my shins), but the calm I feel, the sense of benediction, is all to do with Grossman. He once said that the effect of regular wars and prolonged uncertainty can be seen in the way Israelis drive (people are prone to honking their horns and yelling out of their windows). But you can no more imagine him going mad at an intersection than you can picture him inviting Binyamin Netanyahu out for beer and pizza.

Grossman radiates wisdom, modesty, kindness and, above all, a sort of stillness: contemplative and tender, but steely, too. This is not to say that the darkness is all behind him. He warns me that there are some things he cannot talk about, will perhaps never be able to talk about, and I cannot look at his heart-shaped face, his big, marsupial eyes, without worrying about manhandling him. Grief, inasmuch as I’m acquainted with it, makes a person feel, among many other things, like an over-ripe peach, prone to bruises and watery leaks.

For his own part, he likens it to exile. “The first feeling you have is one of exile,” he says. “You are being exiled from everything you know. You can take nothing for granted. You don’t recognise yourself. So, going back to the book, it was a solid point in my life. I felt like someone who had experienced an earthquake, whose house had been crushed, and who goes out and takes one brick and puts it on top of another brick. Writing a precise sentence, imagining, infusing life into characters and situations, I felt I was building my home again. It was a way of fighting against the gravity of grief.” The merest flicker of a flinch. “This used to be so hard to express… but now, when I talk about it, I feel able to say that it was a way of choosing life. It was so good that I was in the middle of this novel, rather than any other. A different book might suddenly have seemed irrelevant to me. But this one did not.”

Grossman’s heroine, Ora, whom the American novelist Paul Auster has already likened both to Tolstoy’s Emma, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, decides to hike in Galilee for the duration of her country’s latest war. She takes with her an old love, Avram, a veteran of the Yom Kippur war and a former PoW. While they walk, they talk. She tells him about Ofer, describing her boy at every stage in his life, carefully bringing him to life (Avram has never met him). Slowly, an absence becomes a presence. The novel, then, works as kind of memorial: not only to Uri, to whom it is dedicated, but to Ofer, who may, or may not, be dead. After Grossman had finished writing it, he handed it to Yonatan, and to his wife, Machal (he also has a daughter, Ruti, but she was too young for this book at the time). “It wasn’t easy for them to read it,” he says. “I think it was only the second time they read it that they understood that it could be a source of comfort to us all. I’m not describing our family, but there are always moments [when the two collide]. And yes, when someone dies, they’re gone and yet they are still so present.”

Four months after Uri’s death, Grossman addressed a crowd of 100,000 Israelis who had gathered to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. His speech was beautifully controlled, but quietly furious. He denounced Ehud Olmert’s government for a failure of leadership, a failure which would ultimately damage the Jewish state, and he again argued that reaching out to the Palestinians was the only hope. “Of course I am grieving,” he said, anxious that Olmert and his cronies might dismiss his speech as the outpourings only of a bereft father. “But my pain is greater than my anger. I am in pain for this country and for what you and your friends are doing to it.”

I understand that he wants to separate his grief and his politics, but does he think, now, that his loss has changed some people’s opinions of him all the same? “Yes. There were people who stereotyped me, who considered me this naive leftist who would never send his own children into the army, who didn’t know what life was made of. I think those people were forced to realise that you can be very critical of Israel and yet still be an integral part of it; I speak as a reservist in the Israeli army myself.”

His novel provoked a strong reaction in Israel. “Some of my books in the past have aroused hatred [notably his collection of reportage, The Yellow Wind, a sympathetic account of life in the occupied territories]. Not this one. I think this one allowed people to give up on the need to be a fist, to remember the nuances, to ask themselves: what does it mean to be a human being in this situation? Our curse is that all of us become representatives; we congeal. But we need to feel our inner doubts, our contradictions.”

Was it horrible having to grieve in public? He must have feared that his son would be adopted as yet another symbol of the Situation. “I’m not sure it was horrible. One burden is at least taken away [when you are a public figure]: you don’t have to tell people what happened, because they know. We found our way. We’re very private people. We are a close family and we have a wonderful, devoted group of friends. What happens outside that… well, it depends how people approach me. Most approach me with tenderness and sensitivity. There has been a lot of warmth. But I made it clear from the beginning that I don’t ask for special privileges. I don’t want people to say: ah, because he suffered this, his opinions are this. My opinions are not my emotions. I spoke in Rabin Square, but I only do [public] things that I would have done before.

“I’m not a rational, cold person. On the contrary, so much of the politics is emotional here, and the two peoples involved are very emotional, so you must be attuned to emotions very precisely. But the bottom line must be logical. You must not surrender to the primal urges of revenge. I just do not see a better solution than the two-state solution. I’m more sad, and maybe desperate, but not in a way that paralyses me.” He pauses. “Maybe I cannot afford the luxury of despair. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a question of personality: I cannot collaborate with despair because it humiliates me to do so.”

All the same, he cannot feel hopeful at the prospect of more (American-brokered) talks. “I think our prime minister is the only person who can change our destiny for the better. He has a lot of credibility here. The question is: does he really believe in peace with the Palestinians? And I’m afraid that the answer is no. Even if he taught himself to utter the words ‘two-state solution’, he deeply mistrusts the Palestinians.”

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem in 1954; he is the elder of two brothers. His mother, Michaella, was born in Palestine; his father, Yitzhak, emigrated from Poland with his widowed mother at the age of nine. “My mother’s side of the family was religious and Zionist,” he says. “They were poor. My grandfather paved roads in the Galilee, and he used to buy and sell rugs; my grandmother was a manicurist. On my father’s side, well, there was this little sweet grandmother, so wrinkled, so tiny. She came after she was harassed on the street by a Polish policeman. This woman. She’d never before even left the little region where she’d been born. But she took her daughter and her son, and she took a bus, and a train, and a boat and she came to Palestine at the end of the war and cleaned rich people’s houses. And she wasn’t even religious!”

Grossman’s father was first a bus driver, then a librarian, and it was thanks to him that his small son – “a reading child” – was able to indulge his love of books. He grins. “He gave me many things, but what he mostly gave me was Sholem Aleichem.” Aleichem, who was born in Ukraine, is one of the greatest writers in Yiddish, though he is now best known as the man whose stories were the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof. Grossman’s father, like many men of his generation, never spoke of what he had left behind. “Then, one day, he gave me a book by Sholem Aleichem, and he said, ‘This is how it used to be over there.’ Why do I remember it? Because the expression on his face was one I hadn’t seen before. It was the smile of a child. I started reading. The books are in archaic language and I struggled. But I kept going because I felt: this is the code for my father. I read them all. I devoured them. I inhaled them. I read them as a child today would read Harry Potter.

And I was sure that the shtetl continued to exist parallel to my life in Israel. Only when I was nine, and we were marking Holocaust Day at school, did it occur to me that this was not the case. I remember standing on the hot asphalt in my white shirt and my black trousers and I heard all these big words: victims, six million and so on. And I thought: they’re talking about the people in Sholem Aleichem. You see, the Holocaust belonged to the adults. When you entered a room, they would stop talking. Sometimes, you’d overhear something: he lost his first family in Treblinka. But what was Treblinka? Where had he lost them? Would he find them again? So, suddenly, to understand the immensity of the loss… all the people I’d read about, they’d vanished, just like that. I was really shocked!”

Grossman had an aunt who’d been in Auschwitz and her camp number was tattooed on her arm. “When I was a child, it haunted me. I put it in a novel. The character thought the number was like the code on a safe and that if he could only crack it, a new grandfather, warm and friendly, would jump out of his old grandfather. When I got married, my aunt covered her number with a sticking plaster, so as not to cast gloom over the day, and I must tell you that is still one of the strongest memories of my wedding. My heart flew out to her. I thought: how terrible it is that you feel you must be apologetic about what was done to you.”

In 1967, when Israel won the Six Day war, Grossman was 13. He remembers it vividly and believes that the memory helps him to understand some of the resistance on the part of Israel to ending the occupation. “If you want to understand, you have to go there; you can’t deny it. The month before the war, I thought I was not going to live. I took the Arabs very seriously, just as I take them now. I heard a voice on their Hebrew propaganda station promising to come and kill us and to rape our mothers and to throw us into the sea. Then, the first night of the war, when Israel demolished their airforce, and it was clear we were going to win, there was this switch. To feel this miracle! To know we were strong and that after only six days we had become an empire.

“You could see how it changed the way people walked and talked. The arrogance of the talk! The sexual connotations that they used to describe what we did to them! I remember my first visit to a newly occupied place. It was two minutes away from here, in the Old City. I want to be very precise. I don’t want to beautify my actions. The Arab population was overwhelmed and they looked at us with a mixture of fear and asking for mercy. We walked in their streets and we felt like gods. For the first time in our 2,000-year history, we were the strong ones. It’s very hard to resist that. We indulged ourselves in all the feelings we had been deprived of.”

In 1971, Grossman began his national service. “I worked in intelligence and most of it I liked. I left home, I was independent. I felt I was doing something important, that I wasn’t doing anything against my principles.” He served in Sinai, where there is more sand than people, and although he was in the army when the Yom Kippur war broke out in 1973, he saw no action. Where did he stand politically by this time?

“It was a few more years before I started looking at reality, at the places where we are wrong, where we have gone towards the abyss. Only gradually did I start to formulate what was wrong, and what should be done; it wasn’t easy. It didn’t make me very popular among my close friends and family. It was a lot to do with my wife and her family [he and Machal, a psychologist, met while doing military service]. They acquainted me with other ways of seeing this reality.” So she agrees with you? Laughter. “No, I agree with her!” What about his children? “They are OK. They come with me every week to the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah [in east Jerusalem]. We are demonstrating against settlers taking over houses in Palestinian neighbourhoods, but it’s a kind of weekly reserve service against the occupation, too. Sometimes, it gets violent. Some weeks ago, we were beaten by the police.” How dare they beat David Grossman? He smiles. “I don’t know if they know me at all.”

After university, Grossman began working in radio, where he’d once been a child actor, eventually becoming an anchor on the Israeli equivalent of the Today programme. In 1988, however, he was sacked for refusing to bury the news that the Palestinian leadership had declared its own state and, for the first time, conceded Israel’s right to exist. “They were so nasty to me. It was a little scary. I found myself in the middle of this very public affair, my name on the front pages. It was talked about in the Knesset. But I learned a lot about how a big organisation can act against an individual, and it was also a blessing because I had to turn completely to writing.”

Had he always known he would be a writer?

“Yes. I knew it from a very young age. The first time I met my wife, this is what I told her. It was something physical, a piece of a jigsaw falling into place.” Since then, his work has been translated from the Hebrew in which he always writes into 30 languages and he has won numerous prizes. He is unstoppable. Since delivering To the End of the Land, he has written a children’s book, an opera for children and a handful of poems. “I feel poetry is more the language of grief than prose.”

I tell him that every time I travel to Israel, peace feels further away. He doesn’t disagree. “People who are born to war, programmed by war, their entire vocabulary is taken from war. Each step by the other side is regarded as a trick, or a trap, or a manipulation. It’s tragic and we might not have the power to redeem ourselves from it. This is why we desperately need help from the outside. Time and again, we choose warriors to lead us, but maybe by always choosing warriors, we doom ourselves always to be in wars. Neither side wants to do what will benefit the other. They will take out one eye only so long as the other side loses two. Israel stands at a crucial point in its history, each step possibly fatal. But the way forward is so psychologically demanding, so threatening, we are stuck.” He thinks the Israeli boarding of the Turkish boat bound for Gaza last May – nine activists were killed – was pure folly. “It was stupid. We had months to prepare. Why did we choose the belligerent way? Allow them in! Even if there had been terrorists onboard, it wouldn’t have changed anything. Just show some sympathy.”

Meanwhile, life in Israel grows somehow narrower. Grossman’s Arabic is almost as fluent as his superlative English, but it is harder and harder to maintain links with Palestinian friends, let alone to travel there. “I spoke three weeks ago to a dear friend, the writer Ahmad Harb…” He sighs. “Between us, there is the mutual disappointment of people who had a common dream and who saw it evaporate. But I know he continues to fight in his society exactly as he knows I do in mine. We are like two groups of miners digging from either side of a mountain; we know we will meet in the end.” The settlers? They are distorting an Israeli idealism he still holds dear. “The emotional investment we put into the occupation! As Gershon Sholem said, ‘All the blood goes to the wound.’ We are not taking care of ourselves. We are looking in the wrong direction. The settlement movement might really ruin us.”

Grossman longs for Israel to be more than just a shelter for the Jewish people; he wants it to be a home. “And it will not be a home unless we have peace with our neighbours. In a home, you’re comfortable, you breathe with both lungs. Here, we breathe with only one and we are suffocating. Believe me when I tell you that it is so much more important than being the dominator of this valley or that hill.” He thinks most “sane” Israelis know this. What needs to happen next is that, somehow, they must close the gap between what they know and what they do. Not that he regards peace as a Hollywood ending. “It will be difficult. If there is peace, there will have been heavy compromise and that means a lot of angry and vengeful fanatics on both sides. They will do anything they can to assassinate it. They will bomb themselves here and there. But the alternative is worse. If we have no peace, the circles of bloodshed will become even more violent and hateful.”

We have been talking for almost two hours. Grossman has a wedding to get to and there is the traffic to consider and… he shows me his palms, apologetically. “I’ve talked too much,” he says. I disagree. There is something powerfully sustaining in listening to him talk: it means he is still with us. He nods. “I would not have chosen this catastrophe,” he says. “But since it happened, I want to explore it. I feel I was thrown into no-man’s-land and the only way to allow my life to coexist with death is to write about it. When I write about it, I’m not a victim. It is strange and unexpected to discover this. The great temptation is not to expose yourself to these atrocities. But if you do that, you’ve lost the war. The language of war is narrow and functional. Writing is the opposite. You describe your reality in the highest resolution even when it’s a nightmare and in doing so, you live your own life, not a cliche others have formulated for you.” On that terrible night in 2006, he told himself, as he walked from the bedroom to the front door, that life was about to end. “That’s what I felt at that moment. But I was wrong. Life is different, but it’s not over.”

David Grossman will talk about his new novel on Thursday at the Friends House, Euston Road, London NW1, at 7pm. Tickets cost £15; go to jewishbookweek.com

In the third of our series asking writers about the books that formed their literary personalities, the Booker prize-winning novelist Penelope Lively explains why the myths of Troy and Greece were so vivid to her as a young girl growing up in Egypt. She also reveals why she could never have cut it as a historian, even though history writing – such as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic – is one of her passions, and talks about the fascination with landscape that has informed so much of her fiction.

She also explains why she values short novels, idolises William Golding and admires Henry James’s skill at showing all the things Maisie doesn’t know.

Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang
Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas
The Making of the English Landscape by WG Hoskins
The Inheritors by William Golding
What Maisie Knew by Henry James
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

The author of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia, whose latest book, Blood’s a Rover, is now out in paperback, is still driven by his tragic past

Authors who write about dark or disturbing subjects invariably draw the question: where does that come from? But no one who knows anything about him asks it of American crime writer James Ellroy. For the answer is as glaring and particular as one of his brutally staccato sentences.

Ellroy’s parents divorced when he was young and in 1958, when he was 10, his mother was murdered. The killer was never identified and the only arrest was Ellroy’s emotional development.

The following year, he became fixated with the murder of a young, wannabe actress named Elizabeth Short, a viciously sadistic sex assault known as the Black Dahlia case, which became the surrogate crime upon which he could let loose his damaged emotions and forbidden curiosity.

He spent his teens and twenties drunk, drugged and delinquent. He joined the army, was discharged, and became a homeless petty criminal, which led to prison. During his down-and-out years, he developed pneumonia and was hospitalised with a severe lung abscess. Eventually, in 1977, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, became a golf caddy and began writing in earnest.

In an obvious sense, the whole of his subsequent career as a writer, which has produced such hard-boiled crime classics as The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential and American Tabloid, has been a protracted excursion into the recesses of an imagination forever contorted by the trauma of his childhood.

Ellroy’s novels are about America, Los Angeles, crime, corruption, vanity, voyeurism, the misleading allure of celebrity, the strained relationships between the sexes and many other matters, large and small.

But most of all they are about himself and his unending attempts to describe the enormous psychic hole left by the slaying of his mother. Almost every page is haunted by a sense of some unknowable darkness just beyond the narrator’s gaze or the writer’s reach.

Fourteen years ago, Ellroy wrote a chilling memoir-cum-cold-case investigation, My Dark Places, that examined in almost lurid detail the way that his mother’s murder had irrevocably shaped his life. He now thinks he presented his revelations “in a salaciously self-serving manner” and has published a further memoir that was originally serialised in Playboy magazine, “The Hilliker Curse” with the clarifying subtitle, “My Pursuit of Women”.

Hilliker was the maiden name of Ellroy’s mother, Jean, and the curse is the “fever dream” of guilt and sexual longing that the novelist believes is the legacy of her murder. When Ellroy’s parents split up, his father, who Ellroy claims was possessed of a 16in penis, took to spying on Jean. His father was a womaniser and bit-part player in Hollywood who, according to Ellroy, not always the most reliable narrator, was the sometime business manager of Rita Hayworth.

Exiled in the “blast-oven” suburbs of LA, the young Ellroy’s sympathies were with his father. One day, his mother asked him whom he wanted to live with, her or his father. His answer was his father and she hit him, drawing blood. He cursed her and wished her dead. Three months later, the wish was gruesomely realised. But according to Ellroy, it did not mark the beginning of his complicated and sometimes perverse yearning for women.

He has written about how he was “sex-crazed” before the death and has described his early forays into the peeping and stalking that he would return to with greater angst in later years. His characteristically unforgiving portrait of himself as an angry and frustrated teenager is a masterpiece of savage economy. He has described himself as “staggeringly uncool”, requiring “deep-pore cleansing and dermabrasion”.

This image of the psycho-nerd is one that Ellroy has developed into a well-rehearsed public persona, a vision of himself as the jilted outsider that is part raw confessional, part bravura act. In this way, he’s become American literature’s avenging anorak, the LA version of Travis Bickle, the alienated loner from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

One notable aspect of this quasi-fictional character is his politics, that odd combination of libertarian and authoritarian that seems peculiar to the heartland of the American right. A hippie-hating refusenik of the counterculture, he’s been known to call himself “the white knight of the far right”, but in this guise he’s more often a provocateur and prankster than a genuine polemicist.

In the past, he has expressed his support for gun control and opposition to the death penalty, two positions that in some states could have you hounded out of town as a pinko liberal, the political stripe Ellroy claims to loath. Last year, he told Rolling Stone magazine that he had voted for Obama, comparing the new president with Jack Kennedy. Obama was “deeper”, he said, whereas: “Kennedy was an appetite guy. He wanted pussy, hamburgers, booze.”

Ellroy is also an appetite guy, who always knows what he wants: more. But he is also a poet of thwarted appetites. He’s the loser who, during the era of free love, managed to “perv around after women, unsuccessfully”. Twice married, with no children, he doesn’t do conventional relationships. His emotional expertise lies in obsessions.

Earlier this year, in conversation with the British novelist David Peace, he said: “It’s the strangest thing. I am 61 years old. I’m very healthy. I am more obsessed with women than I’ve ever been… but I’m the guy with no place to go on Christmas and Easter and ends up getting, you know, some pitiful invitation.”

Throughout his twenties, he romanticised the other sex from afar, awarding muse-like qualities to strangers in the street. Simultaneously captivated and terrified by women, he turned his attention during his early sober period to prostitutes. His particular taste was for those older than himself – he thought they might be more grateful for his business and be more responsive (they weren’t) – and those who looked normal. “But,” he has noted, “no normal chick peddles her ass for gelt.”

Writing improved his confidence and success improved his strike rate. His past descriptions of some of his book readings sound like backstage scenes from Led Zeppelin’s pomp.

There’s always been a relentlessness to Ellroy’s style and it matches the persistence of his obsession. His motivation for writing his second memoir, he says, was realising that “my mother and I were not a murder story, we were a love story. And I was just thinking, what is the single-biggest fixation in my life, and it’s women. And it always has been”.

He has always been searching for the woman, the one who will somehow erase the past, calm his craziness, understand him, nurture him, fill the absence and yet remain the mysterious “Other”, as he calls her. It seemed, at least to him, that he found her in his second wife, writer and novelist, Helen Knode. Here, at last, was the vivacious release from his mother’s death spell.

He has written of their great love, happiness and shared passion for art manifestos. They moved to Connecticut, but Knode, an LA woman filled with fire, never settled in. Ellroy was nothing if not a controlling presence and would bait her left-leaning friends.

Their monogamous love desexualised his writing, he felt, removing the carnal mania that was the engine of his prose. Then it desexualised his marriage. According to Ellroy, Knode appeared to spend most of their cohabitation asking why they weren’t having sex.

In 2001, during a European book tour for The Cold Six Thousand, he had a nervous breakdown, frantically reading the Bible and believing himself to be riven with cancer. He and Knode moved back to California and Ellroy became increasingly belligerent and antisocial. The marriage stumbled hopelessly to divorce.

He is now with writer Erika Schickel, who left her husband and the father of her two daughters to be with Ellroy. Tellingly, Knode told Ellroy that Schickel bore a marked resemblance to his mother. Their friends have told them that the relationship is doomed.

Studying Ellroy’s life, one can see their point. As Ellroy says: “I always get what I want. I more often than not suffocate or discard what I want the most.”

There’s no doubt that Ellroy’s is a singular voice, but he has been investigating his psychic scars for a long time, and, for all the evidence he’s assembled, he doesn’t appear any the wiser. That may prove his blessing as a writer. As a lover, it’s almost certainly his curse.

Edinburgh international books festival: AS Byatt speaks to Charlotte Higgins about religion, reality, her hatred of diaries and why she wants someone to write a novel about the discourse of Facebook and Twitter

Photographer Murdo Macleod reads the faces of poets, novelists and other authors at the Edinburgh international book festival

This month’s Guardian book club takes Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger as its subject. Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker prize and described by Hilary Mantel in her review for the Guardian as “gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining”, it is a ghost story set in the 1940s in the gently crumbling Hundreds Hall. It tells the story of the Hall’s inhabitants through the eyes of the narrator, stolid, socially clumsy Dr Faraday, who is forced alongside them to the confront the possibility that the Hall is inhabited by a malign and violent presence.

Listen to Professor John Mullan asking Waters about the genesis of her novel - and what really happens at the end of it.

On the eve of his new novel, Lights Out In Wonderland, being published, DBC Pierre says we are all in danger of following in the ‘dangerously blurred’ footsteps of his misspent youth

Leitrim is the least-populated county in Ireland, which may help explain why, on an overcast Monday afternoon in early August, the small town of Ballinamore is utterly deserted. I have arranged to meet DBC Pierre, Man Booker Prize-winning novelist and former drug-taking, hard-drinking, law-breaking tearaway, at 4pm in Prior’s Bar – “The home of good, old-fashioned Ballinamore hospitality!!” – at the top end of the main street. It is now 6pm and there is no sign of him.

By way of diversion, the photographer asks the teenage barmaid if she knows DBC Pierre. She looks blank. What, she asks, does he look like? A bit dishevelled, I say, with a strange accent and a fondness for a pint or two. “That’s not much help,” she says, “Half the fellas that come in here are like that. He’s in good company.”

Around Ballinamore, DBC Pierre – the initials stand for Dirty But Clean, a nickname he earned in his spectacularly misspent youth – is known by his real name, Peter Finlay. Or, simply “the writer fella from up the mountain”. He has been living in relative seclusion a few miles from here for almost nine years. When he won the Booker Prize in 2003 for Vernon God Little, the village was besieged by reporters for a week. He has since written three novels in the extraordinary peace and quiet of the Leitrim countryside: Ludmila’s Broken English, which came out in early 2006 to mixed reviews, an unnamed novel that he jettisoned last year for reasons still not entirely clear, and Lights Out In Wonderland, which will be published next month.

I have travelled from London to Leitrim to meet him but, thus far, my only contact has been two apologetic text messages, the first saying that his jeep had broken down “on an errand to Belfast”, the second assuring us he was on his way back in a rented car.

When he finally turns up around 6.30pm, he looks even more dishevelled than usual, having “belted down from Belfast” in under two hours. “I’m having a bitch of a day, ” he says, after ordering a restorative pint of Guinness and flopping down in a seat by the front window. “Things keep breaking down on me. Last week, it was the computer, now the bloody car. Weird shit like this happens every time I finish a novel. There’s a definite sense of winding down. Things tend to get a bit strange, a bit disconnected.”

Disconnection, one senses, is a not-unfamiliar state for DBC Pierre, whose nomadic lifestyle has led him to this rural Irish hinterland of drumlins, lakes and parochial towns close to the border with Northern Ireland. He lives on a “50-50 road” on a mountainside about five miles from Ballinamore. In really bad weather, he says, “you have a 50-50 chance of making it up without sliding sideways down the hillside”. In the fierce snowstorms that swept across Ireland in January, he was cut off for four weeks, the road impassable even in his four-wheel-drive Land Rover.

“That last winter was the very devil,” he says, shaking his head in wonder, his hybrid accent – part American, part Australian, part London-English and now part Leitrim-Irish – a thing of baffling cadences. “I’ve never witnessed cold weather so severe and so sustained. We had a massive ice storm at Easter, which is unheard of around here. It dropped six feet of snow on the mountain. It wasn’t Siberia, but it was pretty damn cold. It’s already entered local mythology.”

As if on cue, a man approaches and slaps Pierre on the shoulder. It turns out to be the owner of the bar. “How’s yourself?” he asks. “And how’s Jenny?” (Jenny is Peter’s partner, an Australian woman about whom he remains resolutely tight-lipped.) They talk for a minute about this and that, then the owner bids us farewell and another round arrives as if by magic. “They’re as good as gold here,” says Pierre, smiling. “I was here for two years before anyone knew I was a writer. And, in between them not knowing and knowing, they haven’t skipped a beat. They were fantastic then and continue to be so.”

The time he has spent in self-imposed exile in Leitrim has undoubtedly helped DBC Pierre stay on the straight-and-narrow, but it has also further fired up his already baroque imagination. Like Ludmila’s Broken English before it, Lights Out In Wonderland is a flawed book that never quite catches fire the way Vernon God Little did. Instead, it drags the reader along by the sheer energy of its prose, its surreal-to-the-point-of-implausible plot and several extravagant set pieces that, in the extremity of their vision, recall Ballard or Burroughs. In one such interlude, Smuts, one half of the novel’s dissolute double-act around which chaos swirls like a storm, has violent sex with a young girl in a fish tank containing an octopus. In the interests of decency, I will leave the rest to your imagination.

“Nothing in the book seems exaggerated to me,” says Pierre. “The way we live now is way more wild and extreme than anything a writer could make up.”

Lights Out In Wonderland is, he says, the final part of a loose trilogy that began with the spectacularly successful Vernon God Little. In that book, the eponymous 15-year-old hero is wrongly blamed for a Columbine-style massacre in a Texan high school and goes on the run, pursued by an increasingly hysterical media circus that simultaneously demonises and lionises him. (The novel was also alarmingly prescient, having been written before the Columbine high school murders.) The chair of the Booker judges, Professor John Carey, called it “a coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm and fascination with modern America”.

The moment of DBC Pierre’s greatest triumph, though, was almost overshadowed by the controversy that attended it. Most of the £50,000 prize money went towards paying off some of the “lurid” debts Pierre had incurred in his drink and cocaine-fuelled wild years during the 1980s when, as he puts it, he was a “conniving bastard”, a “con man” and an “arsehole”. The most lurid tab was the 30,000 euros he owed to his friend, Robert Lenton, whom Pierre had apparently fleeced back in the mid-80s in a complex Spanish property deal that went spectacularly wrong. The week before the Booker prize ceremony, a relative of Lenton’s contacted the Booker organisers and the Guardian to reveal the author’s wayward past.

“Robert’s kids were angry, and rightly so,” Pierre says now. “And the press created a big stink when they got hold of the story, but, honestly, Robert was fine about it. In fact, when I rang him up after being shortlisted, he spent the entire time giving me therapy over the phone.”

Vernon God Little, then, was always going to be a hard act to follow. Ludmila’s Broken English never quite worked, either as a satire of so-called broken Britain or a dark reflection on a world where anything – including the child bride of the title – could be purchased online. It was inspired, he told an interviewer at the time, by “my disbelief at the way things are in the world and the amount of shit we swallow about how things are supposed to be”. This would appear to be his abiding theme.

When I ask him, though, if he thinks of himself as a satirist, his answer is, for once, uncategorical. “No. Not at all. In fact, I’m not sure where we live now can actually be satirised. Reality has surpassed satire. Nothing I write is exaggerated for satirical effect.”

Nevertheless, there are moments in all his books that skirt the line between the improbable and the implausible. In the new novel, characterisation and plot seem secondary to energy and the kind of extreme invention that has become his trademark. I am never quite sure if this is a deliberate formal ploy or a result of his imagination outstripping his craft. “I think the new book will take a kicking from the critics because of its form,” he says, frowning. “People still want naturalism, but naturalism is about credibility and credibility is not where we live right now. The tools that writers use to give their novels credibility and gravity are no longer employed in our culture. Things do not need to be connected the way they once were in the novel. Nowadays, we need things that shimmer on the surface and have tendrils that reach below so you can see to a certain depth.”

Regardless, I say, it is important, at least, for fiction to be plausible even if it stretches the bounds of credibility. “Well, all I can say to that is, as a writer, you have to sit down at the end of the day, night after night, and say to yourself, ‘How does real life feel? Would it move like that?’ Or, ‘Am I doing that to make people think it would move like that?’ In which case, it’s just a trick. Perhaps the devices that naturalism uses are simply outdated devices. As a writer you have to find ways to reflect the world you live in.”

Like the two novels that preceded it, Lights Out In Wonderland is about what Pierre calls “the ongoing fucked-upness of contemporary western culture”. In this instance, though, he has turned his powers of description not on the effects of drugs and alcohol, the usual signifiers of that fucked-upness, but on what he calls “the pornography of food and food writing”.

Fresh out of rehab, the book’s protagonist, Gabriel, embarks on a quest on behalf of his mentor, a chef called Smuts, to stage the ultimate foodie bacchanal. He crosses continents in search of sublime, sometimes life-threatening, menus created to appease the insatiable appetites of a clandestine global cabal of gourmands-cum-gluttons. The novel’s denouement features a banquet that comprises the most exotic and forbidden menu imaginable: giant panda paw with borlotti beans and baby root vegetables; confit of koala leg with lemon saffron chutney; caramelised milk-fed tiger cub.

“Those are real recipes, too,” says Pierre, proudly. “A chef I know called David Spanner worked them out – theoretically, of course – alongside some vets and zoologists. They diagnosed the musculature of panda claws and stuff like that. You should be able to eat all of those dishes and, indeed, prepare them if you could get the actual ingredients.”

In person, DBC Pierre does not quite live up to the reputation. He is soft-spoken and thoughtful to the point of guarded, not quite evasive but certainly elusive. He looks like he has lived a bit in his time, and has the blotchy pallor and generally down-at-heel demeanour of a man for who a meal is an annoying, but necessary, distraction between drinks. He admits to still feeling like an outsider in the Oxbridge-dominated world of British publishing.

“I read slowly and selectively, but I don’t consider myself well-read,” he says at one point. “I can’t compete on that level, nor do I want to. I’m not really part of the London literary world and, to a degree, I’ve actively resisted being part of it. I’d just be a fucking dilettante if I started going to all those Soho literary parties.”

When, in his late 30s, he sat down to write Vernon God Little, he could only do so, he says, “by committing to myself that I would never show it to anyone, then, forcing myself to reverse that committal when it was completed”. It was, he adds, “a very, very tough decision, not least because there was so much of myself – a self I no longer liked that much – in there”.

At a time when actual experience no longer counts for much in the creating of fiction, DBC Pierre is an exception, someone whose life has, if anything been even more colourful than the stories he writes. In this, at least, he resembles the literary lions of another age, the likes of Mailer, Kerouac or Bukowski, who wrote it having first lived it. One cannot imagine him discussing the art of the well-wrought story over dinner with Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan.

He was born plain Peter Finlay in 1961 to wealthy parents who lived in an old winery in southern Australia. His father, who piloted Lancaster bombers in the second world war and later became a celebrated professor of genetics, took up a research post in Mexico City when Pierre was an infant, and the family moved there to the wealthy Jardines del Pedregal district.

“My childhood still seems utterly surreal to me,” he says, shaking his head. “The neighbours on one side kept Bengal tigers as pets and their daughter received 13 cars among her many wedding presents. It was a place where anything could be bought and where the law was a very elastic concept. I think now, having done some therapy, that Mexico was where my troubles with reality began.”

When I ask him to elaborate on those troubles, he falls silent. Then, after a deep breath, he says: “I was brought up with a total belief in what I could do in a country where there was nothing that you could not buy. It was an almost heroic atmosphere of anything is possible through positive thinking. It is very easy, in the right circumstances and with no visible boundaries, to imagine that you are your potential. That leads to a place where things get blurred morally and emotionally. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because, in a way, where I was living for so long is where we are all living now culturally. Reality TV and self-motivation books and all that crap, they are all just forms of self-projection. That is a dangerously blurred place in which to live.”

Though it is hard to pin him down on the details, life began to become dangerously blurred for Pierre at the age of 19 when his father died. Soon afterwards, the Mexican peso was devalued and the family fortune shrank dramatically. His mother moved to Spain and he seems to have had the run of the family mansion for a few years. He has said before that he once invited his equally rootless friends to a house party that lasted for several months. By his early 20s, having developed a serious cocaine habit and been diagnosed with “narcissistic personality disorder”, he was totally adrift and his reckless escapades were becoming increasingly desperate – and dangerous. In previous interviews, he has described being shot at by a sniper, getting arrested for hitting a cop, and being thrown in jail for smuggling luxury cars over the Mexican border from Texas. He seems weary of these wild tales now, though, and the bad-boy reputation that still shadows him.

When I ask him if he is pursued by regret and shame, he sighs: “A little bit. I feel sometimes like I am founded on those things and that regret and shame are almost institutionalised in me. It has certainly imposed a certain vigilance. I know where the temptations lie and that, for instance, there is much more danger for me in the metropolis. I’m aware of where my compulsions lie and there’s a bit of stepping back from that power socket. These days, I can go over to London and dip into the madness when I like, but my life is much steadier here.”

In the mid-80s, Pierre pitched up in Spain, where, following the Robert Lenton affair, his debts, and the cocaine habit that helped cause them, spiralled out of control. He fled first to Australia, where his sister, Deirdre, lived. There were a few more wild years before he checked into rehab in 1991 at the end of what he calls his “11-year bender”. His travels eventually took him to London. Still living in penury and haunted by his debts, he settled for a time in Balham, where he forced himself to submit to “a mundane routine of working, thinking and writing”. It wasn’t until 1999 that he began writing Vernon God Little. I ask him if it saved his life. He thinks for a long moment.

“I’ve answered that one before perhaps a bit too glibly, but, in a way, it did, yes. I’d hit a wall and went into therapy, the whole deal. Then, I’d been very poor for a fucking long time, 10 to 15 years of pure struggle. So, in a very real way, writing was really my last shot.”

He takes a long drink of Guinness and wipes his mouth on his sleeve, looking slightly uncomfortable at the turn the conversation has taken. “I’m sceptical of the whole redemption narrative shtick that people come out with,” he says. “For me, it was more a slow wising-up. A kind of reality check. I realised belatedly that the mundane rules apply and that is where you have to keep your attention. You work hard, you put a little money aside, you slowly get back on track. That’s the way it is. There’s no easy way through, but for a long time I convinced myself there was.”

I ask Pierre whether, even though his life is now steadier, he is not still, at heart, an outsider. He thinks about this for a long moment. “I feel so, and have felt so for a long time. And I also wonder how much I have put myself there. Is it self-created? A lot of the shit I have done, the way I have lived, has had as its result to be on the outside. What surprises me is that the things that are inherent in me are also inherent in the culture.

“We seem to be very lost, adrift somehow from ourselves, from community. You feel that very much in London, politically, culturally. It’s become a kind of unreal place for me. There’s some kind of cultural limbo that we are living in that, I think, is to do with the death of communism and now the rapid decline of capitalism. I feel I’m writing at a time when old certainties – political, cultural, economic – are crumbling and we are not really sure what is coming on the horizon.”

These uncertainties are reflected in Pierre’s writing in an often oblique or hazy way, particularly in Lights Out In Wonderland. The idea of the “pornography of food” as a metaphor for the end times, he tells me, came to him while reading Petronius on the decline of Rome. “The writing is so modern. The climate of unease and complaint in those books feels incredibly familiar. The banquet was the perfect medium for the powerful to express their power and the sense they had of being above the law. It was a way to be grand. I feel that has certain parallels with what has been happening of late. Bankers, politicians’ expenses and all that. Eating out expensively is always a big factor in there, isn’t it? Money and food seem to assume an incredible importance as a culture declines. I really do think that is the case today, as it was back then. You just have to look at food writing, restaurant reviews in particular, to see that. It comes close to the pornographic at times, that kind of fetishising of food and its rituals.”

For all the cultural unease his writing taps into, Pierre seems to have finally found a measure of personal contentment in Leitrim. His days are now measured out by the slow, steady rhythms of rural life and the discipline of the writing life. There is not much trouble to get into around Ballinamore and that is part of the point of being there, of course, but I sense there is more to it than that. Perhaps he has discovered a sense of belonging, however tentative

At one point, I ask him how the locals reacted when the British and Irish media descended on Ballinamore in the wake of his Booker prize victory in 2003. Back then, his house had been besieged by photographers and buzzed by a helicopter. It must have seemed, at times, like an episode of Father Ted.

“It did, it really did,” he says, laughing. “It was all pretty strange. Joan, the local postmistress in Augnasheelin, who has now, sadly, passed on, had to set up a command centre in the post office. It was mad. Then, when I came back, the parish priest hosted a party and they presented me with a Leitrim crystal cup. It was like living in a movie. You feel like there is nowhere like that left in the world, but there is.”

Has he finally given up the rootless, nomadic life, then? Will he stay here among the farmers and shopkeepers of this quiet, rainy Irish county? “Who knows? My time here is broken up because I do so much travelling, but this is a good place to come back to, to leave everything behind and just let the ideas distil. The whole story of my life is about not belonging and trying to figure out how to deal with that. That’s why, for the time being, this is a very interesting place for me. And anyway,” he says, raising his glass, “I’m what they call an official blow-in now. Someone once asked Joan, God rest her, where I was from, was I Australian, American, Mexican or what? She told them, ‘He’s one of ours now.’ For the time being, that’s good enough for me.”