The ideas behind 'Greater Love'

When I sit down to write a book there are usually two ideas in my head, each vying for supremacy. For ‘Greater Love’, there was the shock of 9/11 and the wish to understand what lay behind it that drove me to read the Koran and discover absolutely nothing there to enlighten me. From this enquiry, though, the character of the Sheikh was born.

Then there was the main idea, much closer to home and which sprang from a reflection on my two eldest children. I had always been intrigued by the extent to which they differed from one another and seemed to forge their paths in life in opposition to one another: operating within the can’t-live-with-you-can’t-live-without-you relationship, common to many close siblings. Twinship, I guessed, would provide a kind of intensified version of what I had observed in my own children and I set about imagining Aisha and her brother, Jose. One of the twins, I thought, would be born with Desire – that vital force that helps us survive in this world – and the other would be born without it. Aisha, the ‘powerful twin’ will carry her brother, Jose, through their cruel childhood. But what happens when she abandons him? Aisha discovers that she may have desire but that she lacks love and she can no more survive in this world without love than Jose can without desire. So the book became about Aisha's quest for love, or rather her journey, guided by the Sheikh, to learn how to love."