Why do novelists set their stories in cities or landscapes which seem to haunt them? Not the places of their childhood – an obvious choice – or places they’ve researched because those places are intellectually attractive. The places they can’t avoid in their own subconscious. I’m often asked this question because the places I write about are considered exotic. But to me, it’s the reverse. I write about a city long after I’ve lived there and left it, having never had any intention to write about it at all. Such was the case, for me, with Istanbul. I moved there in 2011 after 20 years in New York. It came about by chance. My mother died that year and I came back to Brighton to attend the service. There was a week’s lugubrious interval between service and cremation, during which Newsweek asked me to fly to Madrid to interview Pedro Almodovar. This seemed like bad taste until my sister argued that, to the contrary, it was exactly what my mother would have wanted. So I went. Almodovar was charming and subjected me to a day of casual psychoanalysis. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘about your mother.’ Then we talked about next steps. Don’t go back to New York, he insisted. ‘Go somewhere different. Move on.’