She hadn’t planned on writing a third instalment, until Lila started to speak to her. Lila herself is a wild, untamed force, but, as with all of Robinson’s fiction, the drama is not grand or explosive, but is found in the minutiae of daily life. “I don’t know where these great governing clichés [about writing] come from – that you have to follow a convention, or that the first sentence has to hook the reader in,” laments Robinson. “That’s just poison. So much of the time I spend teaching, I actually spend unteaching.”