Guadalupe Moreno alfaro asked Catherine Banner:

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Catherine Banner Yes, I do love history. But I must admit that I came to historical fiction writing by a very indirect route. When I began to write The House at the Edge of Night, I was convinced it would be a modern book. I wanted to write about the 2008 financial crisis, and about young characters, so I didn't see any reason to write about the past. But gradually I came to understand that it wouldn't make sense to tell that story without also going back into the past to understand the events that came before - what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls 'The road that led us here'. In this, I was particularly influenced by magical realist writers, who collapse time and tell the stories of generations with a wonderfully light touch. To try and piece together the road that led us to the financial crisis, I decided to immerse myself in documents and sources, visit libraries and archives, and see what I could discover. And when I did that, a strange thing happened. As I researched 20th century history, whole new vistas opened up, and I discovered many untold stories belonging to the past which I felt also deserved to be told. The book, in the end, crosses a long sweep of time - both the personal history of one family and the bigger history of the world beyond their island - and I think it also became a stronger, more interesting story because of that. For me now, particularly as a European writer, I feel that I can't escape writing about the past because in it I find powerful reflections of our current predicaments, experiences, hopes and fears, and the seeds of what makes us who we are.

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