We’re offering Tony Ballantyne’s thought-provoking first novel Recursion in our September magazine, and so we asked him if he had anything the club members might be interested in knowing:

As a child I used to spend ages wondering how many snowflakes needed to have landed before you could say it had snowed. Now I spend my time wondering at what point a set of reactions becomes a thinking being. Some people talk about pushing back the boundaries of fiction, some people want to discover new territory. I'm more interested in exploring the borderlines. It's far more interesting there.

I don't know why I write. Nobody ever asks young children why they want to be footballers or pop stars. I just know I always wanted to be a writer. I try to do it for an hour every night after the children have gone to bed. I don't know where my ideas come from; I don't know why I get irritable when I haven't written for a while. But I do know that I get an enormous sense of satisfaction when a story works out properly. It's those moments that make it all worthwhile.