Question: Your three novels are very different in terms of place, structure, even style. Your first, The Boy, set in a derelict and labyrinthine London, is lyrical and psychological. Your second, The Genius of the Sea, ranges from Thailand to South America, with elements of magic realism and a stories-within-stories structure. And now The Perfect Man, taking place, for the most part, in the small river town of Pisgah, Missouri, during the 1950s, and bringing to life a vivid community bound by long-held secrets. Are there elements that are common to all of your books?

Naeem Murr: A number of things, but perhaps most significantly those long-held secrets you mentioned. As a child my imagination was provoked by what I was not told; by the silence, particularly with respect to the pasts of adults who were important to me: my mother, who never spoke about her clearly troubled past, and my father, who died when I was a baby and existed only as a black-and-white photograph in my room.

I think for children, adults, particularly parents, stand between them and the world before they were born, as well as the world beyond childhood. The more secretive and mysterious that adult is, the more imaginative the child is forced to be about what once existed and what lies ahead. I can’t help but see the writing of fiction, at least in part, as my reaction to this silence.

Q: Why 1950s Missouri?

NM: I loved Missouri, where I lived for a number of years; near the river itself, in fact, which is beautiful, flowing between high bluffs and the eerie landscape of the floodplains. It’s a very green, wet, and fecund place, which I found extremely evocative. Spending time in a particular landscape slowly separates me from other places I’ve known, from my past, myself; and the less I’m cluttered with myself, the freer I am to imagine. And what I imagined was the people for whom this place was home.

Also, Missouri is right at the heart of America, arguably, culturally, between the north and south, and certainly between the formative east and the idea of the west. Fitting, then, that it was also once the bed of a sea splitting this continent, with a seabed’s striations in rocks full of fossils. There are Amish communities, which take you back centuries, as well as old farming towns, many falling into dereliction.

So I experienced a vivid sense of past in a place that was alien to me, which was like that first, provocative silence I talked about. For me place provokes character—an element that comes out of that world but also resists it. When these characters become vivid enough, cross a certain threshold, they begin to tell their own stories. In Missouri, the first character that came to me was Ruth, followed by Annie, Raj, and Lewis.

Q: At that stage, are you simply holding the rudder as the author?