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The last chapter became the first and the whole thing was retrofitted to accommodate the map-makers. The novel began as fragments that slowly coalesced, were sequenced over years and then bolted together. The composition of Europe in Autumn is an interesting parallel to Dave’s fiction writing career. Dave enjoyed writing a cynic, someone who’s seen it all but still plods along and doesn’t give up. Soon Rudy became a little voice in his head. Further character layers came from Dave’s experience as a service station kitchen porter and his observation that in science fiction, people don’t cook and eat enough.

Besides, the universal need for food means chefs can have a kind of cross-border role indeed, chefs are almost a nation unto themselves. Dave wanted a character who did an ordinary job. Not only is Rudi a spy, but he’s also a chef.

The Fractured Europe novels follow a spy, Rudi, as he crosses the boundaries of reality, while Europe itself breaks into ever smaller nation states, some no larger than a city. Eventually he had them create different versions of England to overlay our own. But where would the barriers lie? For some time, he had been thinking about a family of uncanny map-makers. He realised that writing the thriller that he really wanted would mean reintroducing borders. Once the Iron Curtain fell, Dave says, the spy genre lost its way. The Fractured Europe series is inspired by Cold War spy fiction: bleak, powerful stories which often rely on national borders for political and narrative tension. Still, it’s intriguing to think of Dave Hutchinson, author of the award-winning near-future Fractured Europe series, as an air traffic controller in a parallel universe … managing the borders between nations, between earth and sky …

Dave credits the absence of planes falling from sky to the fact that he didn’t get the job. One of the jobs he applied for after leaving university (he graduated from Nottingham with a degree in American Studies), before beginning a career in journalism, was air traffic controller. Any writing career has its highs and lows, and in Dave Hutchinson’s case, quite literally.