Is any part of this novel autobiographical, or is it wholly imagined?

The Poison Tree is autobiographical with respect to its setting—like Karen and Biba, I turned twenty-one in the summer of 1997 and remember it like it was yesterday, and I was living in Highgate at the time. This was simply because I was daunted by the task of writing my first novel; there were so many unknowns that I wanted to root the action in a time and place I could be confident about describing.

Most of us have flirted with dangerous situations or people during our college or young adult years, but few pay the price that your protagonist, Karen, does. What inspired her story?

I have always been drawn to characters on the cusp of adulthood, students in particular, because it’s such an intense, irresponsible time of life. Our minds and bodies are adult, we are no longer under the care of our parents, not yet burdened by careers, mortgages, or children. Relationships and living arrangements tend to be quite fluid, with friendships forged and abandoned almost weekly, and the same goes for lovers; these fluctuations and transitions mean that life is brimming with potential for fun, sex, experience and the dark side of these things too: heartbreak, betrayal, death. Since turning thirty a few years ago I’ve come to realize just how small a window of irresponsibility those student years are, which makes it seem, in retrospect, even more intense.

“The Poison Tree” has been compared to everything from Daphne DuMaurier’s “Rebecca” to Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”. Who were your literary influences?

I’ve read Rebecca and Brideshead countless times, and I’m hugely flattered to be mentioned in the same breath as either of them. What they have in common is a theme that has always resonated with me, that of a young person being seduced by a house and its inhabitants, with fatal or heartbreaking consequences. Barbara Vine’s early books were a huge influence on me; she is the mistress of the fragmented, extended flashback structure that I used for The Poison Tree (and indeed my next novel). Reading The House of Stairs and Grasshopper I realized for the first time that “murder mystery” novels don’t have to start with the discovery of a body and work back from that, that your characters need not be marginalized criminals, PIs or policemen, and that lyrical writing and interesting relationships need not mean sacrificing plot. I also love Ian McEwan, Audrey Niffenegger, Tana French, William Boyd, Maggie O’Farrell, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Rebecca Miller. Going further back, I’m obsessed with the English Victorian writer Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone and The Woman in White are dense, droll, and brilliantly plotted: he was the pioneer of the genre that we now know as the psychological thriller.

In what ways did you draw upon your own experiences as a journalist when writing this novel?

My experience as a journalist was useful in that I don’t get “stage fright” in front of a word processor, but actually it was more detrimental than helpful. Writing fiction is the opposite of journalism, where one owes it to one’s readers and editors (not to mention lawyers) to adhere to the truth, so after a decade of interviewing and fact-checking you can imagine that writing a novel was hugely liberating for me. I don’t think you need to be a professional reporter to write or even identify with that. The Internet means that we’re all journalists now, to a degree; anyone with a broadband connection can find out the most surprising details about someone else’s career or private life in minutes. I know that some writers lament the passing of telephones and letter writing, and that cell phones and e-mails make suspense fiction harder to write, but I think current technology is hugely democratizing. A young mother, working late in her home office, can experience the thrill of the chase while her daughter sleeps upstairs. It means that any of us can experience that cat-and-mouse feeling at any time.

You were pregnant with your daughter, Marnie, while writing “The Poison Tree”. Did you ever find it unsettling to dwell upon such a disturbing tale with a child in your womb?

It might sound strange but I found writing a dark novel reassuring rather than disturbing. I felt very vulnerable when I was pregnant, very aware that nothing was under my control, from the size of my belly to the big bad world my baby would be born into. Writing The Poison Tree allowed me to exercise total control, even if only over a fictional world.

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