Michel Faber was born in 1960 and started writing novels in 1972 or thereabouts. His unfinished and abandoned books include “And They Shall Inherit The Earth”, “Leon And The Locomotion”, “Woman With Long-Tailed Llorriphole”, “A Photograph Of Jesus” and – miraculously rescued here – “The Ship Of Fools”. Then he wrote “The Crimson Petal And The White”, “Under The Skin”, and so on.
He lives on the south coast of England, with a clear view across the Channel to France. Before that, he spent a quarter of a century in the Scottish Highlands, having emigrated there from Australia, after spending his early childhood in The Netherlands. Perhaps understandably, he gets puzzled when people talk about immigration as if it’s some sort of calamity like cyclones or cancer.