Dominion

"Dominion is about the Second World War, but it’s a ‘what if?’ book. What if the Germans had taken over? I don’t know if that really counts as historical because none of it happened. I wouldn’t normally be drawn to a book that isn’t rooted in actual history, but you really get involved with the characters and it’s so vivid. He describes a big building in London with a nasty swastika hanging from it, and it’s lit in red. You can absolutely see how it would have been. Yes, we’ve become a kind of satellite of the Third Reich. The Nazis have made promises, and they’ve been breaking those promises. At first, they let the British have certain things and then those have gone. We’re more and more under the power of the Nazis. I read it about three years ago. It makes you realize how flimsy democracy is, how fragile our society is. We might so easily have been in that position, had we continued to appease Germany and let the Nazis in. It’s a really clever book. It’s also completely gripping once you get into it. It really makes you think, ‘But for this happening or but for that happening, but for that personality…’ That’s what interests me as a writer, how things can so easily go wrong. How the dynamics can cause issues and drama and it becomes a completely different story. I was less drawn to the story than I was to that idea, but then once I was in it, I was in it."