A is for ambition. Once I started work on Imogen Imagine, I realised that in a number of ways it was a more ambitious work than my previous books. For one, I was a man in his 50s writing from the perspective of a 20-year-old woman. I’ve written from a female perspective before – Hayley Birnham’s point of view makes up a significant proportion of Foul and Fair, for example – but Hayley was closer to me in age than Immy, as well as closer to me in her experiences of life and parenthood. I recognised that making Immy believable and authentic was central to the success of the book, and that a woman of that age today would be very different from the women in their early 20s that I knew when I was a young man. For another, the book’s structure was more complex than I’d attempted before, and for a third the subject matter required me to dig deeper in the emotions of the characters. There were a few highly charged set-piece scenes that I knew I had to land if the book was to resonate in the way I wanted it to. I’m so proud of how it has ended up, although of course it will be readers who have the final say on that.

Ambition is there for the book’s principal characters too. Carl Denby, Immy’s ex, is living his dream of pop success, while Immy is still stuck in Bournemouth and stuck in the shadows cast by past events. When we meet her, she is still dealing with a traumatic past, and the ubiquitous presence of a song that misrepresents her story, and she’s uncertain of what she wants to do with her life. In many ways, Imogen Imagine is a book about a young woman seeking to claim her own voice in a world where she feels silenced and sidelined, a woman working towards an ambition that she hasn’t identified yet.

At one point, Carl justifies something by pointing out that rather than being like he is because he’s now a star, he’s now a star because of how he is – his attitude towards his music and his career created the opportunities for him, rather than being a product of his success. Whether he makes a fair point is something else I’ll leave the reader to decide, but it raises an interesting question. The comedian Jimmy Carr was once asked what advice he’d give a teenager. His answer was something along the lines of, whatever it is that you’d love to do, go after it as if failure isn’t possible. I think that’s good advice for ambition, and I sometimes think the thing that divides people who fulfil their ambitions and those who don’t is how committed they are long before there’s any evidence of success. I recently read Philip Norman’s biography of George Harrison, and I was struck by George’s willingness to give up a secure job as an apprentice electrician in order for the fledgling Beatles to undertake a short tour as backing band to that giant of rock and roll… er… Johnny Gentle. Sometimes you have to throw your cap over the wall and commit to the journey, even when you can’t see beyond the wall.