At the heart of Leave to Remain is the two authors, who, like Janus, share two faces and a mind that begins as two but comes to function as one,.

Forty-two-year-old Irina McGovern, a children’s book illustrator in a stable relationship with a nice man, spends an evening dining out with a snooker-playing acquaintance and, brought to the brink of unexpected attraction, she kisses him.

The magician never gives away his secrets. Tunga is content to explain his, yet the sum of these secrets remains a mystery.

“When I started writing I ran through the genres. I never wrote autobiographically. First of all I wrote detective stories. After that I wrote a science fiction novel. Then, finally, a Gothic novel, and felt at once at home.”