It all started to take its place in my mind. The French take freedom of speech and the right to express what they believe in very seriously, and to see how at risk that was… This freedom is one of the cornerstones of French philosophy and I take it very personally. “When he made his way home, we discovered it was the Charlie Hebdo team, and one of the illustrators was a designer who had worked with Michel. I don’t think he’d even heard about the attack at that stage because he was in a meeting. I tried to call him and then sent him a message and was completely fraught until I heard he was okay.

“He was in Paris that day and when I heard about the attack, I immediately, selfishly, asked, ‘Where?’ I went on the internet and saw that it was literally steps from where Michel was. “My husband, Michel, had been particularly touched by the Charlie Hebdo attack,” she says in one urgent breath. Watching powerless her adopted nation under siege once more – the echoes of barely a few months ago still achingly fresh in her mind – sent her reeling. The November strike was the tipping point, after weeks of bottled-up rage in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks just a stone’s throw from her husband Michel’s Paris office. I started writing within a fortnight of the attack.” I thought a fraction of their life story, everyone waiting there, is locked in there and the result is yet unknown. It was like a key that unlocked something inside me. We were watching the people standing outside the Bataclan and she said to me, ‘Think of all their mothers’.

“My mother and I were watching the news and I was translating to her what was happening as the evening went on. “I was in tears,” says the 69-year-old Anglo-Irish author, her voice catching ever so slightly at the memories. Six feverish months later, her latest novel The Lost Girl was complete. She committed to paper the caterwaul of the ambulances shattering the stillness and the anonymous masses pressed behind the cordons…waiting. Like a tidal wave, the senselessness of the Paris attacks poured out of her. Carol Drinkwater described the images of strewn bodies gleaned on news reels that night.

The hunger carol drinkwater