Atkinson began writing Big Sky the day after she finished Transcription, her second world war espionage novel. But “if you put a detective in a novel it becomes a detective novel, there’s no way round it”. In Big Sky “everyone is breaking the law”, or taking it into their own hands in one way or another. “I live to entertain, I don’t live to teach or to preach or to be political. If I have a job to do it is to entertain myself first and then everyone else afterwards.”• Big Sky by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday (£20).

Source: The Guardian June 15, 2019 09:00 UTC