Yannie and Shan grow up in Malaysia, where much of the novel’s early tension takes root. Did you spend time there, either during the writing process, or earlier in your life?

Yes, I’ve spent time in Malaysia, but Yannie and Shan’s world is not my world. The story doesn’t happen in Malaysia, it happens in remembered Malaysia. There’s a difference. It is a rendering of what life might have been like in a different time and place, filtered through diasporic memory and (mis)representation.

Have you read ‘The Glass Menagerie’ by Tennessee Williams – the bit at the start where the narrator says, ‘this is a memory play’? And because it’s memory and not reality, the actors don’t eat with actual cutlery and props, they just sort of gesture in a stylised way using their hands. Well, Revenge is a memory play.

There is meant to be a level of abstraction which is meant to coalesce into emotional truth, although in the end it was written in a more realistic style than I initially intended. There were also some inaccuracies that I deliberately allowed to remain – for example, the layout of the house in the first scene does not really sound like a Malaysian house occupied by a family of that class position.

One line I quoted in the novel, ‘the long delayed but still expected something that we live for’, is also borrowed from ‘The Glass Menagerie’. In a way Yannie is a rendering of Tom from that play, who has to act ruthlessly to get out of a personal and economic trap, except she doesn’t quite manage to, at least initially.

So yes, the story is set in Malaysia, which has personal connotations. But it’s also set in ‘the place you needed to get away from’, whatever that means for you – maybe you managed it and maybe you didn’t…