Goodreads asked Paul Kitcatt:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Paul Kitcatt I started to think about it while my mother was in a succession of care homes at the end of her life. In a care home, social interaction is limited: the carers are too busy and the other inmates are often in various stages of dementia. My mother, like many other residents, had far too little social intercourse of the kind she needed and was used to.
I’d been reading in New Scientist about developments in AI, and it struck me that sufficiently advanced AI could provide a solution. Especially if it was embodied in a synthetic human. It turned out to be something scientists working in robotics are actively developing, and while I was writing the novel some early experiments were carried out with elderly people.

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