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The Penguin employee book club read The Book of Night Women by Marlon James and submitted these questions to the author. The resulting Q&A is here:

1. You bring these characters and this time period to such vivid life. What kind of research did this novel involve? What resources did you have available?

I was already familiar with quite a bit about slavery, having studied it from high school days. It's the defining event in Caribbean history so you can't escape it even if you want to. Whether you're in history, cultural studies, music or economics, Slavery is the diaspora's Genesis chapter. So much of the history of slavery I already knew, but I still did a ton of research. History can be good at the what, when, where and even how, but not so much with the why. So I read slave narratives, master narratives, ship logs, tax records, pretty much everything. Histories of Fashion, costume archives, even weather patterns in the eighteenth century. The trick with research though is to not get so consumed with it that it becomes another form of procrastination. I had the first draft done before I did most of the research. As for resources, Jamaica does have an abundance of it, especially about slavery, but thank God for the internet or this novel would have taken twice as long.

2. Several of the characters bare classical names of gods/demons/and others found in Greek mythology and other religious texts. I wonder what significance this had for you in writing this story and developing the characters, and also how you might explain its relevance to Jamaica and the lives of the slaves during this era.

The choice of Greek names started out as a sort of tribute to the two forms of literature that got me through high school: Greek and Shakespearean drama (okay three: Huckleberry Finn). It was much later on that I realized that the tragedy of the story and the surprising yet inevitable movement towards it was very Greek in structure. Also, Greek tragedy was never afraid to make even the hero grievously flawed, an understanding of humanity that we've since lost, thinking our heroes must be perfect (Witness Michael Phelps). I wanted to write about women and men who, even where they were good, were still flawed. Sometimes tragically so. But The Book of Night Women is also a book about books and the redemptive power of literature. Also, Greek Myth was the first set of stories that ever fascinated me as a kid.

Also, with literacy being one of the many aspects of free life kept from the lives of the slaves, though, as we see in the story, many of the slaves overcome this barrier to reading, who can we determine is doing the naming in this story, slave or master?

Oh definitely the master. Greek names imply that the master was a highly cultured man. Lilith is the only character whose name isn't Greek, but as you read on, you'll see that even that has significance.

3. Could you talk about the language you use in the book? Where was it derived from? Please explain the meaning of these two words in particular: "backra" and "pickney."

We used to call this language "broken english" years ago, in fact some people do, as if it needs to be fixed. But the language in the story comes from several sources. There is of course the African languages: Twi, and the Yoruba tongues that assimilated with English. The lyricism in slave language was as much from African as it was from Irish and Welsh English. For example, Pickney is a shortening of the british Pickaninny and Lawd a massy (Lord have mercy) is a welsh English term. But backra is African, as is combolo, meaning company or nyam, which means to eat voraciously. There is a temptation to dismiss patois as an inferior English (or not English at all), but we're stretching language, adding flavour to it without even knowing, shaping it for our own use. We grabbed the English language, chewed it up and spat it back out with more dimension, sensuality and auditory quality than it had before. We're still doing that now with hip-hop. Look at a modern day example: Ignorant means lacking knowledge, but in Jamaica it really means pig headed. Sure you know what the word means but think about how it sounds. Doesn't it sound like somebody who would be pigheaded?

Voice was my biggest struggle with this novel for several reasons. For one, I wondered if a book written totally in any dialect would be read at all. A Clockwork Orange, Push, and The Color Purple were all in dialect but they were also not very long. My book was adding on pages and pages and my first concern was "this will never sell, nobody will read it." But the more I wrote in King's English, the more wrong it felt. I got as far as page 45 before the novel hit a dead end. This was a novel that simply had to be told in the voice made to tell it. But man it was a struggle. It was bad enough having that ever present internal critic, but my internal sales team was going haywire. But my novel refused to move further than page 45 until I gave it over to the voice that eventual told all 417 pages of it.

4. How did you write from a female point of view? Which women in your life most informed you in your writing? Did you ask these same women to read your story prior to its publication?

My first novel was so man-centric that I just needed a break. It's funny, years ago when I was only a couple drafts into my first novel, a female writer read it and said I didn't have a clue about women. I was stunned of course as is anybody in Jamaica who grew up surrounded by strong women. We still talk about this phenomenon in Jamaica, "my mother who fathered me." But that was the problem. It was easy to turn a woman into a goddess or demon, but harder to make her a real person. Funnily enough, I learned how to write realistically about women not from the women I knew but those I read in books. My friend assigned me Sula, and I read Song of Solomon. After that it was stacks of Nadine Gordimer, Iris Murdoch, Jean Rhys, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf and Erna Brodber.

My first three readers were all men, actually. This sorta just happened. I think the idea that only a woman can write women is as ludicrous as saying only white people can write about white people. You have to be careful about what kind of validation you seek when you write fiction because then you run the risk of writing by committee. I can understand the concern people have with authenticity though; empathy is turning out to be a lost art.

5. What do you think Lilith's redeeming qualities are or did you intend for her to be an unlikable character? How do you see her and how do you hope readers will view her?

I wonder if Shakespeare had our sensibilities about heroes and villains if we would have ever ended up with Othello or Macbeth. I don't know if Lilith has redeeming qualities so much as human qualities. I wanted to capture these women as realistically as possible but with some whimsy since after all, this is a novel. But we also have to understand the time and that their moral choices were so much more different than ours. Lilith is very much a person of her times with blood on her hands as well. Homer was even harder to write because she was threatening to become one of those quasi mystical, sex-less big mama types that populate so much storytelling, from Gone with the Wind to Madea. I wanted readers to like her, but I also wanted readers to get very upset with her. I wanted real women from a violent time, making good choices but also terrible ones. I wanted them to be like us, missing the neighbour who died, but glad the cat smell is gone. Good and Bad without me skewing it so that you either love or hate them. My favourite character to write was actually Isobel. The conflicts and contradictions in her appealed to me.

6. On the first page you write that blood has no color but then later you write that the redcoats are the color of blood. What is the significance of the motif of blood in the book, how does it change? What does it represent to the characters or to the narrator who comments mostly on blood? Violence and blood seem to unify the story. Was that a conscious decision?

That's a hard question to answer. I don't know if I was conscious of blood or its significance when I wrote it, maybe my subconscious did, but writers are more often than not unaware of the themes they are exploring. We just want to tell a good story. But back then bloodshed and brutality was as commonplace as usage of the N word. Yes, the reader should by horrified by all that blood, but they should be even more horrified about the characters' nonchalance towards it.

7. You write, "Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will." What do you as the author make of it?

There are some lines in a book where you have to leave greater meaning to the reader. I'm very big on that, leaving open spaces for the reader to slip in and let their own minds work. If ten different people read that line ten different ways, think of the conversation that starts! So I'm leaving that one alone...

Marlon James, Penguin Book Club, The Book of Night Women, Riverhead, Penguin Books