But they are surrounded by real stuff, and the places are real. Is any part of your plot owed to real historical events? I often thought of them as I was writing The Last Runaway. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. And one of the characters uses the N-word – painful but necessary.

Then I throw in a few verbal tics, such as 'thankee' for 'thank you'. What I do is to strip the words back, so I get the dialogue to sound timeless. Authenticity is almost impossible, and you always end up sounding too olde worlde. What are you aiming for in your dialogue?ĭialogue is always tricky. I try to write 1,000 words a day – about three pages. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8am. One of my characters is a milliner, so I went to a hat-making class in London. For instance, I had to learn about how a 19th-century farm would run, by visiting an Amish farm in Ohio – very smelly and squelchy and alien. I have to be able to describe the minutiae of my characters' lives. My sensibility lies within Europe, and I think that helps me be more objective than if I were living in America. I have a memory of the US, but it is almost 30 years out of date. When you write about the historical midwest, do you approach it as an expat? When I went back for research I spent a lot of time driving around country roads with music blasting – Gillian Welch, the Punch Brothers – then stopping the car to sniff the air. But those four years there were formative. Apart from Oberlin, I've lived in London ever since. I was an east-coast kid from Washington, DC. Did you know it, outside your Oberlin days? New Testament historian James Crossley, author of Why Christianity Happened, discusses the implications of Bauckham's work and whether the Gospel of John was written by the disciple John himself, as Bauckham claims.The new novel is steeped in the midwest. Richard argues that the Gospels are based on eyewitness accounts and should be regarded as fundamentally trustworthy. Richard Bauckham is author of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which won the 2009 Michael Ramsey Award for Theological Writing and has been heralded as a paradigm shift in the way the authorship of the Gospels should be seen. In two successive programmes, transmitted on 29th August 2009 and 5 September 2009, Justin Brierley and his guests discussed 'Jesus and the Eyewitnesses' on his Premier Christian Radio programme Unbelievable?. Clicking on further links within the Popup will stop the audio.

The last runaway book