The Word is a work of speculative fiction that presents a world in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo are worshipped as gods, and their songs are treated as scripture. What inspired you to write this book?

It was partly the result of a mildly drunken evening with an old friend, a fellow Beatle fan. The talk was of their enduring appeal and the seeming religious language that was used to describe them as they faded into history. They were often described as Gods and certainly John Lennon seemed to have been made into a secular saint in many people’s eyes. One of us remarked that it would make a good book to describe a world in which they had become an actual religion. And hey presto, I wrote the first book, Love Them Do, about a world set in the future where there was One True Religion, and it was based on the songs and ‘teachings’ of the Fab Four.

The letters between Paula and John become one of the book’s emotional anchors. Why did you choose that correspondence as the primary way to explore belief versus skepticism?

This is the second in the series, and the first featured a narrator who was somewhat sceptical of the divine nature of the Beatles. This was partly to highlight the silliness of some aspects of the religion, but also the narrator was a follower of John, a truth seeker and sceptic who famously sang in his song ‘God’, shortly after the break-up of the Beatles, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’. I felt he therefore represented John’s own open-minded truth seeking. In this book, The Word, the narrator is a follower of Paul and a true believer in the divine nature of the four Gods from Liverpool. I felt this reflected Paul’s love and belief in the band. He was probably the most upset when they split in 1970. The correspondence is therefore between the sceptical narrator from the first book and the true believer of the second, which I felt allowed for a nice interplay between them.

The humor comes from treating everyday moments in Beatles history as profound religious events. Did writing the novel change the way you think about celebrity culture or the stories people tell about their heroes?

Yes, it was quite fun to write in terms of imagining all the religious Orders that appear that follow a particular God or saint in their story and also interpreting quite normal events through the lens of them being divine. In many ways, of course, their story is remarkable, so it wasn’t always a huge leap to give a religious slant to aspects of their story. The book is partly a homage to the Beatles (it is, after all, a nice religion, based on peace, love and laughter) but it is also about the stories we are willing to believe to make our lives bearable, however irrational they might seem to outsiders, which, it seems to me, is how religion works. If you believe my slightly far fetched stories I will give you everlasting life etc. (in Beatle Heaven in this case!).

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

You won’t be surprised to hear that my next book is the third in the series and features a follower of George. It is called Our Sweet Lord and will hopefully be out early next year.

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