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Chris Cleave's first book, Incendiary, published in 2005, could truly be described as a baptism of fire. In an eerie twist of fate, the novel - which centres around a terrorist atrocity at Arsenal football stadium - was published on July 7, the very day the London tube
and bus bombings occurred.
The press, including the New York Times, which branded the novel "a simple case of tastelessness", vilified the 35-year-old author and Incendiary was withdrawn from sale in Britain.
"There was not much I could do about it once what had happened had happened," recalls Sussex-based Cleave. "I thought the only decent thing I could do was to get back in my box.
There was no way to promote the book in any good taste. What happened to the people involved in the attacks was a lot worse than what happened to me. I just had to take it with good grace."
However, Incendiary, which takes the form of an open letter to Osama bin Laden from a widow whose husband and young son perished in the fictional blast, has stood the test of time and was recently made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams. "It's important to remember that it got a lot of good reviews and won some prizes," says Cleave.
"So I don't want to be negative about the whole experience. But the sheer amount of hatred directed at me after I became associated with the events of that day was overwhelming. People couldn't make a distinction between who I was and what happened on 7/7. I became the bogeyman, the bad luck guy. I got a lot of hate mail and a death threat."
Cleave hopes that lightning doesn't strike twice with his new novel The Other Hand, which focuses on another controversial topic - that of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.
"I've been reminding myself of the subject matter of the book and wondering what could go wrong; what hideous coincidence is going to screw up the publication of this one," he laughs ruefully.
Finding a home for The Other Hand was a struggle for Cleave, who parted company with his original agent and publisher Random House in the wake of Incendiary's disastrous fallout.
"I had such a horrific experience that I swore never to write another book. But it's what I love doing, I can't stop. Even when I was polishing up my CV, wondering what other jobs I could do, I was doodling away writing short stories.
Writing actually got me out of what I think was severe depression." After many revisions, The Other Hand eventually began to take shape and was picked up by Hachette Livre offshoot, Sceptre.
"I didn't think it was fair what happens to asylum seekers in this country and I made the mistake of getting angry about it," he says.
"My first draft was incredibly angry and I got rejected by everybody. Eventually I remembered what we do as writers, which is to write an entertaining story. So I sat down and wrote something that I thought was quite beautiful and made me want to laugh."
Despite its dark premise, there is plenty of humour in The Other Hand, which explores how the lives of London magazine editor Sarah O'Rourke and African refugee Little Bee are tragically entwined after a horrific incident on a Nigerian beach.
However, most of the light relief is supplied by O'Rourke's 4-year-old, Charlie, who like the eldest of Cleave's two sons, insists on being addressed as Batman and refuses to take off his superhero costume. "I basically just took dictation from him," laughs Cleave.
"Charlie is a comic foil to the very serious action that is going on in the book. He is a very serious focus for the two women characters; he makes them look at the consequences of their actions.
It's not just their lives at stake, his little life is involved as well." Cleave is so incensed by the appalling conditions that illegal immigrants and asylum seekers endure in Britain, where they are often locked up for several years in what he terms "concentration-style camps" before finally being deported, that he stops in mid-sentence at one point and apologises for ranting.
"We wouldn't treat individuals the way that we treat groups," he says. "We are not all evil in the developed world and they are not all victims in the developing world.
If we can meet at some sensible level then we will tend to help each other. It's when you institutionalise charity, refugees and asylum seekers that these people become statistics, they become dehumanised."
While The Other Hand is set in Britain, it is just as relevant in New Zealand, which Cleave will visit for the first time this week. "All countries have got really excited about their immigration policy.
Believe it or not, my idea of what an immigration policy should be is not that radical. Countries are right to have quotas on immigration. I am not one of those people who thinks there should be no border controls but you have to remember that asylum seekers are human beings just like us."
* The Other Hand (Sceptre $38.99) Chris Cleave will talk at the Village Bookshop, Matakana, on September 23, from 6pm; Marsden Bookshop, Wellington, September 24, from 5.30pm.