Going off the rails, and other stories: Desmond Hogan's tale

'I wrote a novel in Dublin, partly about a boy who drowned himself. I was cycling down to Grafton Street, and the whole handwritten manuscript whirled into the air and blew into the Grand Canal. People laughed.

'But an old lady waded in in her wellingtons with an umbrella. I actually got most of it back, apart from the bit about the boy drowning. I abandoned it. It was too smeared and the work resolved itself into The Ikon Maker. I wrote that hitching from Sweden to Spain, and left the entire thing on a number 8 bus that goes to Kilburn. I found it in the bus garage.

'I went to Iowa, where I spent most of my time in the pub. At the end of a drunken night I discovered my bag with the whole beginning of A Curious Street was stolen. I couldn't rewrite immediately. It took about four months. It was probably good to pause. I created a more complex book than my earlier fiction.'