Michael Ondaatje’s fiction often grows out of an image. His most celebrated novel, The English Patient, for which he shared the 1992 Booker prize, had at its origin a vision of an aeroplane crashing into the desert. Who was in it, or why, was unclear until he began working on the book.

Divisadero, Ondaatje’s latest novel, originated less from an image than from a particular setting: the Petaluma hills of northern California. It is a region of tucked-away ranches, dotted with debris of the Gold Rush era, where Ondaatje lived while teaching at Stanford University some years ago. “There’s a kind of solitude and privacy in the landscape,” he says. “As soon as I arrived, a new world started coming forward.”