Wendy: Was it difficult to fictionalize the story?

Clare: The facts of the virgin birth story were just a springboard – I kept to the details of the medical tests that mother and child were subjected to, but the characters and their fates are pure invention. Once I had plotted my story and envisaged my characters and their individual histories, the writing flowed relatively smoothly.

Wendy: The main character, Jean Swinney, a lonely and bored woman approaching 40 who lives with her mother, seems on the surface a strange choice – she’s unglamorous and her life uneventful. Why did you opt for her?

Clare: It’s always easier to identify with an underdog than with someone powerful and successful. We feel their disappointments and triumphs as if they’re our own. The lives of ordinary people are in any case full of wonders.

Wendy: She becomes entangled with the Tilbury family which involves her in difficult choices between her personal happiness and doing the right thing – potentially scandalous decisions for the 1950s. Are they still relevant dilemmas today?

Clare: The book addresses the conflict between duty and personal fulfilment and asks what level of self-sacrifice the individual should have to weather for the greater good of society. Most of the characters have to wrestle with this to some degree. I think we put a slightly higher premium on personal fulfilment today, and are less inclined to judge those who pursue it, but those issues are still relevant.

Wendy: Are you working on a new novel? Can you give us any clues?

Clare: I am only at the planning stage – it would jinx it to say any more.