Rupert Thomson has attracted the kind of critical acclaim which would flatter any rockstar, let alone writer. He's been compared to Dickens, Kafka and Grace Jones; The Insult was chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 favourite novels of all time; and his first novel, Dreams of Leaving - one of the earliest books to be published by Bloomsbury soon after it was established in 1986 - found fans in everyone from the drummer of Souxsie and the Banshees to the New Statesman, who said, “When someone writes as well as Thomson does, it's a wonder other people bother”.

His latest book is called How to Make a Bomb (or Dartmouth Park in its American edition). It's a heady, swirling novel about a writer's psychic collapse which begins in Norway and takes him to Cadiz and Crete. There are shades of John Fowles's The Magus to it: acute, sensitive, eerie but compulsively readable. 

Interviewed and edited by Magnus Rena