"In Griffin & Sabine, the words and pictures were of equal importance, but the simple postcard format only permitted a partial mixing of the two elements. When I began The Venetian's Wife, I wanted to go one stage further and make the images part of the thread of narrative - to make the pictures even less illustrational and more information carriers in their own right. This was all well and good during the writing and painting stage, but when it came to the design of the book the task became far more complex than I'd first envisaged. The art had to fall not only on the correct page but exactly in the right place on the page. And as the book was a continuum, with no chapter breaks, every tiny change of text or alteration of image size and placement had a knock-on effect through the whole thing.

"I heard of Niccolo Dei Conti in passing, on a PBS program. I was amazed that he could be so historically unrecognized considering his extraordinary travels. (In the fifteenth century, he journeyed from Venice to Java, to China, five times around India and back to Venice.) When I researched him, I found almost nothing - which naturally led me, being the kind of person I am, to filling in the blank spaces with a life I invented for him.

"Initially I chose the story's E-mail element because when Griffin & Sabine came out, I felt some people were being overly sentimental about the forever-lost halcyon days of letter writing. I wanted to show that what you make and send electronically can have its own romantic mystique as long as aesthetic sensibility is applied.

"As for the Hindu artifacts, I'm no expert on the art or the religion but within it I found such depth and sensuality that once underway, the story practically grew of its own volition.