All right, well, welcome to a special edition of the Empire Podcast. We are joined today by

novelist, graphic novelist, everything is Twitterist, Neil Gaiman. Welcome.

Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here.

And we're talking, I think, I want to start off with your new book, The Ocean at the

End of the Lane, which I think is out today, actually. I love this. I thought this was absolutely

fantastic. I was just saying it's the kind of book that not only is a very good story in itself,

but gave me lots of memories of being a child and I kept having sort of flashbacks to being

little and being very concerned when my dad went out to cut the lawn that he'd cut some of the

daisies and I had to go out and pick them. Weird things came back to me that had nothing to do with

what was going on in the page, but it was just very evocative of that time in your life.

It's really interesting as a writer because in some ways you sort of almost have the idea that

you're not meant to write about children, if you're writing about children, it's a children's book.

And I wanted to do a story that had children in it, a seven-year-old viewpoint character,

and I wanted it to be filled with magic and weirdness and scary stuff, and absolutely wanted it

to be for adults. I loved the idea that you'd be talking to adults about things that

they all have in common, which is they've all been kids at some point, and a lot of them

haven't forgotten, but a lot of them have sort of covered stuff up, and my favorite reaction

from readers on this so far is just people kind of been saying, you wrote about my childhood,

and I tell, tell me about your childhood, and it becomes very apparent that they had a

childhood that was nothing like the childhood in the book, except that because I was so very specific

about the way that the narrator thinks, and he's seven, and I'm just going in there and plundering

everything that I thought the way that I saw the universe when I was seven, that weird

...