Dear Reader,

For months I resisted reading Caledonian Road. Never mind the rave reviews, the prizes it was picking up, and that it was plastered over the window displays of all of London’s Waterstones bookstores as Book of the Month. Because did I really want to spend 600 pages reading about the angst of a middle-aged intellectual white man?

Despite this, something beckoned— here was a social novel in the tradition of Dickens that looked at the murky money connections between Russian oligarchs and the British aristocracy. Set in London, it dug deep into politics, immigration, street crime and the dark web. With the very human story of Campbell, an art critic, a self-made intellectual who rises from the ranks and then inevitably starts to fall. And so I began, and in doing so, was drawn in deeply.

I met author Andrew O’Hagan soon after, at this year’s Jaipur Literary Festival. A slender Scotsman with a melancholy resting face and a wry sense of humour, Andrew spoke to me about why the social novel matters. We met more recently, this time on Zoom.

On a recent Friday afternoon Andrew is hunkered down in his Scottish seaside writing den, surrounded by the detective-like charts that fuel his Dickensian cast of 60. Here are edited excerpts of our conversations.

The youngest of four boys, you grew up a feminist?

I was the only feminist in my family, including my mother. My father was a tough man who lived according to old-fashioned, very macho rules—you just earned the money and drank a lot, and the boys were supposed to be tough and the girls were supposed to be sort of servants. My mother was a cleaner. She cleaned schools, she cleaned chip shops, and then she would come in and do all this work at home for free. And all these men just expected to have their mother running around, producing bread and soup and, I mean, it was amazing, and it was amazingly objected to by me. But my mother would say, I enjoy doing this, and this is my life. Over the years she seemed to enjoy it less, and became much more feminist afterwards. But, yeah, I wanted to get that energy into the book, because that was what I grew up with. Not just in our house, but in all the houses in our housing estate in our town, women were slightly subjugated by men, and the stories about how they achieved a revolution in their own lives are still arriving in novels and plays and poems today.

Your father was a strict man?

He was a very strict man. He was an addict, an alcoholic, a violent person—a social problem that was almost commonplace in the world I grew up in. Often, the people suffering in those circumstances are not only the addicts, but their partners and their children, and this is part of........

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