Tess of the D'Urbervilles without the depressing bits

American-born Meg Rosoff's five novels have all been set in Britain where she has lived for 22 years. Photo / Supplied

From the dystopian scenario of her debut How I Live Now to the '60s boarding school drama of her fourth book What I Was, Meg Rosoff is an author notoriously hard to pin down. The London-based writer travels further back to the Victorian era in her latest novel The Bride's Farewell, which centres around precocious teenager Pell Ridley who leaves her home village on her wedding day and strikes out into the unknown.

"They're all completely different," she says. "Different voices and different genders with third-person and first-person narratives. I don't know if I do it consciously but long before I knew I could be a writer, I knew that I could write in other voices. I could write the next James Bond book if somebody told me to. I'd have trouble with the plot because I'm not very good at that but I could get the voice easily enough. I find all the different voices easy to do and I'm also frightened of repeating myself, although my publisher would be thrilled if I did that."

Set in the same mythical West Country region of Wessex, The Bride's Farewell is inspired by the work of Thomas Hardy. "I didn't want it be a pastiche but there's definitely some heavy nods to him," she admits. "I studied 19th century English literature at university so a lot of that is in my head already. I'm also slightly obsessed with late 19th century British explorers. There were some women in the late 19th century who were unbelievable. They left home, bought themselves a camel, disguised themselves as men and took off into the Empty Quarter [the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula] or Iraq. They were extraordinary stories that all came together in this book."

Based partly on colourful Victorian adventurer Isabella Bird, Pell is a more optimistic counterpart to Hardy's famously doomed Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

"She was this great character who gets endlessly screwed over by life so I thought it would be nice to do a character very much like Tess who doesn't get screwed over by life," says Rosoff, who believes that Pell is driven as much by circumstance as by determination. "She refuses to accept the life she's destined to lead but when she takes the first step, she's kind of stuck in a way and has to keep going.

"She can't go back so she has to keep going forward. But it's not like she's a great noble character who sets off to conquer the world; she's just trying to find her place in the world."

At around 18 or 19, Pell is as old as Pride and Prejudice heroine Elizabeth Bennet. "They have exactly the same arc," she says. "They're both searching for their identity, what they're going to do with their lives and who they're going to choose. There's a big history of it."

Born in Boston, Rosoff has lived in Britain for more than two decades and can sympathise with Pell's wanderlust. "I was one of four daughters and three of them stayed within 20 minutes of where we grew up and then I left," she recalls. "I knew that I had to leave. Like in Australia and New Zealand, a lot of people leave America. There's almost a genetic component to those who feel that compulsion."

While their exact locations and time periods vary considerably, Rosoff's five novels to date have all taken place in her adoptive homeland. "I don't know why I can't write about America," she says, admitting that her outsider status provides her with a distinct angle on British culture. "There's a very fine line between knowing the place well enough to be able to write about it and writing about it as an English person would.

"I don't ever want to do that. You have to understand England well enough to be able to write about it but you have to keep that foreigner's perspective as well. It's a great advantage being a foreigner because you're not inside the place. People say, 'you've lived there for 22 years, don't you feel English?' Which is crazy because you couldn't even if you wanted to. It's just not allowed. It's different in America because everyone there is from somewhere else."

While many of her protagonists are in their late teens, Rosoff's novels are not specifically aimed at young adults. "I just write for myself," she says. "I'm interested in that journey and that search for identity. That applies to a lot of older people as well but it fits more elegantly in adolescence. If you talk about a 48-year-old guy wandering the world looking for what he should do with his life, you just think, 'Pathetic! I feel sorry for his wife.'

"But everyone I know in their late 40s is looking for another career or their marriages are breaking up. That question of identity goes on throughout your life. I write about adolescence rather than writing for adolescents. It hooks in with a lot of older kids but about half of my readers are adults."

From Pell's faithful horse to the moose of last year's novella Vamoose, animals are a constant presence in Rosoff's stories. After I'm enthusiastically greeted at the door of her Highbury home by her two Bedlington terrier crosses, it's apparent they are also a significant element in her life.

"Animals have always been a part of my identity although I didn't have a dog from when I was 17 to just after I wrote Just in Case," she says, referring to her third novel. "There was a greyhound in it, who just kind of wandered into the book. I knew nothing about greyhounds but I fell in love with his character, which is completely idiotic."

Despite initial impressions, there are actually no canines in Rosoff's next novel There Is No Dog, which will be published later this year. "The title comes from the punchline of a joke about a dyslexic atheist who walks up and down in front of a church with a big sign saying 'there is no dog,"' she says.

"You don't have to know the joke. Some people will get it and some won't. It's about God turning out to be a 19-year-old boy so he's sex-mad and lazy as hell. He's also slightly dyslexic so he mixes up America and Africa. His mother wins the planet for him in a poker game so he gets to be God. He does all of Creation and makes 25 million species, which he didn't need. He does it all in six days so how well did he think it through? Not well enough, as he forgets things like putting food down for the carnivores so the animals have to eat each other. And then he falls in love with a human."

After that Rosoff will finally explore the land of her birth. "The book that I've just started takes place in upstate New York, which I know nothing about so I guess I'll have to make a trip to look at it," she says. "It's about a guy who disappears and I thought that would be a good place to disappear because it's so big and empty."

* Meg Rosoff is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 11-15