Although he goes through all this turmoil, I'd hate to give the impression that this is a pessimistic book, I think it looks at some really tough questions both on a personal level and a social level but actually I think it is quite an optimistic, sunny book in the end. I used last night the metaphor of custard, he has been brought up to the boil, he is unravelling, forced to question everything, the way he looks at life, the values he holds, what is important around him but through that there is a process of re-engagement, in terms of his family life. Yes the pace, the intensity, has to mirror his inner turmoil but in the end of the book I think what he is left with, although his life has been torn apart in some ways, is hope. So you’ve mirrored and experienced the same torturous unravelling as your character?! The tension for your main character certainly mounts up as the novel progresses, the novel starts in a nice leisurely way as you are explaining the setting and your characters are being established but as the novel progresses you get a real sense of Gabriel twisting and turning, absolutely trapped and almost frenzied. So it has been something of a journey, it took two years of solid writing as well but I guess the book is a journey, it is about an emotional journey that the protagonist takes, so it feels fair enough that I undertake something gruelling. I wrote another book in the meantime and then I spent a year doing the research intensively but I’d been thinking about it and reading around it for longer than that.

Can you give us a rough timeline from when you first got the idea for the novel, the research and then the publishing process? I first started thinking about this book in 2002, when I’d first handed in the manuscript for Brick lane, and it was something that was on the backburner to use a kitchen metaphor, for a while it was simmering away.

You did research for a year before writing In the kitchen. In a serious, sensible and enlightening interview, Joyce Fraser spoke with the literary high-flyer about her new book In the kitchen, workplaces, dislocation, libraries and custard. One of the most familiar names at the 2009 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival was Monica Ali.

Monica ali books