I’m not sure if I can truly pinpoint the moment my new novel Once A Monster was born – but I can trace the history of some of its most important ingredients. As a boy, looking through an old illustrated book of Greek myths, and being at once captivated and reviled by a depiction of the Minotaur, looming in the shadows of the Labyrinth beneath Knossos.
As a twentysomething, unemployed and living in London, my imagination fired by the allusive sound of its oldest street names – the Crutched Friars, Seething Lane, the Black Ditch – and realising that London has been a dozen different cities across its life. As a thirtysomething, my infant daughter up on my shoulders and (having realised for the first time that books were things real people actually wrote) asking me to write ‘a ballerina book’.
I’m not sure why theseOne of the joys of writing is seeing the collision of unexpected things and sticking around to see what story might emerge. But somewhere along the way, the Minotaur of Greek Legend appeared in my mind walking through a mist-wreathed London, a London on the verge of modernity, a London being renewed and recast (as London so often is) by human endeavour. Soon, I could see the Minotaur sitting with an orphaned girl on
