These are Nick Harkaway's responses to our questions:
 
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1. To begin with, please could you give our readers a brief synopsis of your book, The Gone Away World?

First things first, it's a big book, but it's fun. It's also really hard to describe because it goes everywhere, does lots of different things - so all I can do is give you a taster...

So: the world is broken. Something bad has happened, and people are mostly restricted to the Livable Zone, a narrow band of safe space around a pipeline which pumps out some kind of anti-toxin or similar and keeps the badness at bay. Unfortunately, the pipeline is on fire... Meet the gang: a moth-eaten, bawdy, alarming bunch of hard-cases, led by Gonzo Lubitsch, who are hired to deal with the blaze. Except - nothing's ever simple. There's skullduggery afoot. They're being lied to.

And then we go back to the very, very, very beginning - Gonzo and the narrator as kids, growing up, and we do the whole history of the world over their lifetimes, through their eyes: war, collapse, love and romance, terrible danger, rescue... all to get us back to that moment when they have to put out the fire. And that's where it gets really exciting...

This is a big, loud, mad adventure. It's also a comedy, a romance, and occasionally a political satire, but you can ignore that if you want to.

2. How does it feel to have published your debut book?

Amazing. Terrifying. Hopeful. (Doomed! Oh, I'm doomed!...) No, I'm going with 'amazing'.

3. Where was your idea for the story born from?

I have no idea. Madness, probably. It's an utterly ludicrous thing to write for a first novel, and I had no idea it was going to be this way when I started. I mean, I knew some of it, but... But really it all started small: two guys. Truck. Broken world. Maybe some ninjas...

4. A quote of yours stated that you’d like the book to “steal the readers day”. Is this something that has happened to you and which authors books do you find impossible to put down?

It always happens to me. And it's not always the books which other people get most excited about, either. It's just whatever gets to me at a given moment. There's a section about the birth of curry and the British love affair with it in a cookbook I was reading, and I got so into it I missed a train. I want that to happen to you...

You know what would be great? If there was a noticeable drop in national productivity which could be tied to this book. That would be incredibly satisfying. (If also, clearly, irresponsible and bad and no one should throw a sickie just to find out whether he dies or not. No, no. That would be quite wrong.)

Yes. If I wasn't scared enough this time, that'll do it. On the other hand, some people will be crossing their fingers for me, too, and that's really nice. But more than that, it doesn't really matter how scared I am - I love writing. So I have to do it.                                   

6. In a world where there are so many talented writers, what advice can you give to those trying to break through?

Blimey... um... well, I suppose there are two things. One is really prosaic, and the other is from the heart. The first: be nice to assistants. Every agent, every publisher, everyone in or near the book world gets lots and lots and lots (really, really lots) of requests to read things. The only way to make sure yours gets read is by being so nice that everyone wants to read it. Assistants control everything, really, so start with them. The second is: do your thing. Not literally 'write what you know' but 'write who you are'. I, for example, am a slightly maniacal, geeky, good-natured sort of person with a lot of useless information and a fundamental optimism about life. I would therefore be very, very stretched trying to write a slow, measured story about human misery and grinding defeat. And yet that could be an amazing book, if not exactly beach reading. That isn't to say, by the way, that you're restricted in terms of genre. Something like a detective novel, for example, can be anything - comedy, tragedy, noirish morality tale... you just hang that on a structure of Crime/Investigation/Outcome.

7. Where can our readers find out more about your work?

There's a website - www.thegoneawayworld.co.uk

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