Their story is heartbreaking. But, as Makine says: "I could tell you the story in a couple of words. It's a father and daughter. The daughter becomes a prostitute. The style is more important. It's not the what, it's the how."

His favourite writer is the Russian Ivan Bunin. "He was a great stylist who wrote very suggestively. He didn't spray us with ideologies or worries. His writing is pure poetry." The only English writer he likes to read is Katherine Mansfield. "She was truly sublime, also very suggestive. Her books are the very essence of anti-totalitarian literature. They suggest and you can follow or not."

Makine's appetite for personal freedom and his admiration for writing which hints at ideas rather than bludgeons them to death comes together in his books when he takes on the notion of Homo Sovieticus, the suet-faced drone of Soviet life. "Homo Sovieticus is a myth, a cliché. Despite the masks we wore, despite the fact we seemed like a homogenous, Victorian society, people retained their characters. Just like Oscar Wilde was never a good Englishman."

His decision to write in French, which he learned in Siberia and perfected while in Paris, is also linked to his desire to be unbound, even by language. "Language is just grammar, which one can learn," he says. "The real language of literature is created in the heart, not in a grammar book.

"When you begin to write, everything is in play. If you were to write about your childhood home, it wouldn't be my childhood home. If I wrote ‘in my childhood home' you would understand something completely different. You see your grandparents standing on a green English lawn, that's not a Russian childhood home."

Rather than obsessing about language, he says, "one must be very open to all the details of life, the physiognomy of people. That's how one writes." For all of his characters, he says, there are dozens of prototypes. "I don't 'invent' my characters or stories. I don't like the word. It sounds like lying. I prefer the word 'guess'. I'm a bit like Sherlock Holmes. I see a small stain on your shirt and I deduce from that there are all kinds of possible reasons for the stain, until I have a story."

Give him two or three years in London, he says, and he could describe an Englishwoman perfectly in English – preferably after falling in love with one. "Otherwise you risk writing clichés."