Meet Tom Henning

Every novel needs a narrator, and mine came with strings attached. Tom Henning turned up in my head fully formed, opinions and all, and made it very clear he'd be doing the talking. Two decades and several rewrites later, I still don't think I've talked him out of anything. So, in the interest of managing expectations, here's what you're in for.

Tom is Swiss. Properly Swiss – the kind who grew up twenty kilometres from Berne and will point out, politely and every single time, that it's the capital, not Zurich. Ask him about his village and he'll tell you it has just over a thousand people and absolutely nothing else worth reporting. He says this with a straight face. He means it as a compliment.

He's the sort of man who narrates his own crises in the tone he'd use for a delayed train. Redundancy, a doctor telling him he's to be admitted to hospital that afternoon – Tom receives all of it with the same mild, faintly put-upon calm, as though the universe has simply added one more item to an already inconvenient to-do list. Panic, as far as I can tell, isn't a setting he owns.

What he does own is a gift for the deadpan aside. Ask whether he's fluent in English and he'll say 'absolutely' – true enough, on a technicality, and delivered with the confidence of a man who's never been asked to define 'fluent' under oath. A jobless spring becomes a series of interviews in which he's simultaneously overqualified and underqualified, sometimes by the same interviewer, in the same sentence. He doesn't find this as funny as I do. He just finds it accurate.

By his own admission, Tom is better at logistics than feelings. Give him a delayed flight, a foreign transport system or a stack of invoices at an ungodly hour, and he'll manage – methodically, if not always cheerfully. Give him an actual emotion and he'll change the subject to trains. He once appointed himself 'unofficial sequence manager' for a family Christmas, purely so nobody would open two presents at once. Nobody asked him to. He did it anyway. That's Tom in a nutshell: quietly, unnecessarily thorough, and allergic to admitting why.

He notices everything and announces almost nothing. He'll clock the exact moment a conversation shifts, file it away, and say something about the weather instead. This isn't emotional constipation, whatever his brother might imply. Tom simply trusts a situation to reveal itself in its own time – which works beautifully right up until it doesn't, at which point he's usually on a plane or in the wrong queue at passport control, wondering how he got there.

He also has a habit of being technically correct in ways that help nobody. Mention that a journey took ages and he'll tell you exactly how long, to the minute, and which connection was to blame. It isn't showing off; his brain is simply wired that way – distances, timings, exchange rates, the precise number of invoices between him and lunch. Somewhere underneath the numbers, there's a man quietly falling in love and trying not to make a fuss about it. He'd rather you noticed on your own.

If you're after a hero who monologues his feelings, wears them well and always knows exactly what he wants, he's not your man. But if you like a narrator who's dry, a little stubborn, more honest by accident than by design, and quietly kinder than he'd ever admit, then Tom's your man. He'd probably deny all of this. Then he'd offer you a coffee, because it gives his hands something to do.

Read Chapter One Free