Tell us about your new novel, Every Exit Brings You HomeWhen an aggressive and troubled single mother moves into Jamal “Jack” Shaban’s Chicago building, it sets off a series of conflicts that invoke memories of his traumatic past in Gaza. It’s a love story and a reckoning with the past.Can you explain the paradox in the title?Jack, a flight attendant, is constantly trying to escape his past and himself, but can’t.How hard was it to make fiction relating to Gaza amid so much suffering there?Not hard: essential.Can you see any way out?Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” So, no.It is also a portrait of immigrant life in the US, diverse people sharing the same space in a block of flats, an analogy for Israel/Palestine. You live in Chicago with your wife, the poet Averill Curdy, and teach at Northwestern University. How difficult is it to be an immigrant in Trump’s America?Chicago became a city full of masked and heavily armed Ice thugs beetling around the streets in unmarked cars with tinted windows. Terrifying.Your mother is Irish and your father was Palestinian. What is your sense of identity? Tell us about your mother My mother is from Annagassan, Co Louth, then Dublin, with an Angela’s Ashes childhood. After she married my father, we moved to Lebanon. When he died, she brought us to London, where she worked three jobs so we could eat. I’ve never felt at home anywhere.You said once you write fiction because she told you nothing about her past. To get behind the facade?My deep connection to my loving but mysterious mother provoked a curiosity about the truth that lay behind every grown-up facade. My stories emerge intuitively out of her silence and the silence of my dead father.The Perfect Man (2006) was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Tell us about it and the follow-up The Genius of the Sea, inspired by an article about a welfare cheat feigning disability.The Perfect Man, set in a small Missouri town in the ’50s and ’60s, is centred in the mysterious murder of a child. The Genius of the Sea is about a social worker who encounters a stranger in his childhood home, a man who might be a con man or his father.You received a fellowship to the University of Houston for a PhD, but sold your first novel, The Boy, and left to teach and write. Tell us about itThe Boy is about a man who is tracking down a foster child he believes destroyed his family. The truth is far more complicated. ‘I’ve always felt life is tragic and I’ve always felt enormous sympathy for just how difficult life is.’ How does this part of your outlook influence your fiction? I’ve never been interested in standing at a superior distance from my characters – in mocking or satirising humanity.‘Writing is about delegating ... to language; to structure.’ Could you explain?For a novel to come to life, the author must cede control to character, language, structure, setting and the reader. Authorial control kills.‘Fiction is about two things: intimacy and truth.’ Please elaborateFormula for a novel: a complicated interplay of intimacy and estrangement pressured by a slowly surfacing truth.The past weighs down your characters. Tell us how Mary Gaitskill taught you how to combine past and presentIn Gaitskill’s stories, past and present begin as distinctly separate entities but slowly infiltrate one another in powerfully evocative ways. The past is always present. This is how Every Exit Brings You Home works. How do you balance humour and tragedy?In the way a musician balances tonalities or a chef balances tastes and textures.How hard do you find publishing? The editors who bought your novels have always moved on by the time the novel came outSo many horror stories! In the end, you just hope for some luck.Which project are you working on?A Palestinian version of Midnight’s Children.Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?For me, the pilgrimage is into the books.What is the best writing advice you have heard?Learn your craft!Who do you admire the most?My mother.You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?My novels on every school and college curriculum for all time.Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?The Land in Winter; Sentimental Value; The Rest Is History.Which public event affected you most?The elections of Donald Trump.The most remarkable place you have visited?Turkey.Your most treasured possession?I’ve never treasured possessions.Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?A dinner party made up of brilliant writers is not a dream, it’s a nightmare.The best and worst things about where you live?Best: Lake Michigan. Worst: no countryside.What is your favourite quotation?“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Thomas Mann. Who is your favourite fictional character?Any of Dickens’s secondary characters. I’ll say Harold Skimpole.A book to make me laugh?Bleak House.A book that might move me to tears?All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews.Every Exit Brings You Home is published by Summit Books UK