“Do you call yourself a journalist?” asks the novelist Ian McEwan after I have asked him what he’s going to read from when he visits the Lewes Literary Club on Monday. I say that yes, I do, I am. “Well I suppose this is a bit of a scoop; something I haven’t told any journalists before. On Friday I handed my latest book into the publishers. It comes out in April. I haven’t talked about it to the press before.”

I’m excited, of course: and I’ve been excited since I learnt earlier in the morning that McEwan had agreed to a telephone interview with Viva Lewes having been sent an issue to read. “It’s called ‘On Chesil Beach’. It’s a very short novel,” he continues, “you could call it a romantic novel. It’s a sad love story, which takes place one night in 1962. On the Dorset coast. That’s as much as I can say about it.” He hasn’t decided, he tells me, whether to read from that on Monday, or from his latest publication ‘Saturday’. He seems to be plumping for the former option, from the tone of his voice, which makes the event all the more exciting.

McEwan has got a gentle, cultured voice. The first thing we talk about is Lewes. He spent a summer here in 1968, while studying at Sussex University. He was lent a flat by a tutor. “I have very fond memories of ploughing through all seven volumes of Richardson’s Clarissa. I missed a very important rock concert in order to stay where I was. My memories of the novel are all mixed up with my memories of the place.”