If we’ve been too lucky in one area of life, that can stunt our ability to empathize with people who haven’t been that lucky. Tana French: Mainly, I was thinking about the connection between luck and empathy. Lily Meyer: What was the first spark of The Witch Elm? Did it begin as a novel about privilege or luck?

I spoke to French via Skype about people who are too lucky for their own good, how we can all learn to see our own privilege, and what happens when you find a skull in a tree. It’s as gripping as it is thought-provoking, as intelligent a novel as I’ve read in years. Tana French’s first stand-alone novel (her others have been part of a series about Dublin murder detectives), The Witch Elm combines questions of luck, privilege, guilt, and responsibility with a murder investigation, a big heap of family drama, and crystal-clear Irish prose. He’s in the middle of a murder investigation, and he’s far from ready to cope. He expects the Ivy House to be idyllic, but in this way, too, his luck has run out. Toby goes to recuperate at the Ivy House, the family home where he spent summers with his uncle Hugo and cousins Leon and Susanna.

The witch elm