The hopeless, uncompromising message of the book seems to be that every character is compelled to love but, in this world must be punished for doing so.. We find them in different states of despair at the beginning, crying out against a religion that they feel brutalises them, and that is where we leave them. His wife, Kaukab, practises Islam with an unquestioning devotion. But through Aslam’s skill at bringing her tortured inner life and estrangement from her Westernised children to life, she becomes complex and vulnerable to the reader.The only possible criticism of this book would be its unrelenting bleakness and the lack of redemption of its characters. It is so convincing that we could begin to see how social pressure weighing down on the parents of the murdered Chanda forces them to condone the so-called Islamic retribution meted out to their daughter.The central figure, Shames, is a convincing modern Asian caught in the no-man’s land between white community racism and the brutal cultural practices of his “own people”.

But Aslam’s intimate characterisation of family members coming to terms with the double murders makes it one of the most original and penetrating pieces of writing about an Asian underclass I have read.

He paints an audacious and unpatronising picture of the extremities of this secretive, close-knit community. Dealing with honour killings, religiously motivated bounty-hunters, wife-beatings and the forced marriages of girls to their first cousins, the book could have run the risk of presenting us with a clich?and oversimplified picture of Asian Britain, which is teetering all too recognisably on the brink of a crisis against an unwelcoming, racist landscape. The emotional life of Maps for Lost Lovers revolves around a Pakistani community’s response to the honour killings of two Muslim lovers, Jugnu and Chanda, in an unnamed Northern town in Britain. Aslam’s portrait of immigrant life captures the darkest elements of the culture clash experienced by this small, inward-looking world, which has none of the hallmarks of the sophisticated “multicultural melting-pot” Britain of today. The community contains deeply savage elements and operates in accordance with the social and sexual codes of the villages of its homeland.

Robert Dawson Scott is the producer, for Lion Television Scotland, of ‘John Irving: My Life in Fiction’, to be broadcast on BBC4 at 9pm on 18 August ‘Until I Find You’ is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). John Irving appears at this years’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. “I felt it would be a relief to me to give myself some distance from Jack Burns,” he says now, confident that it was the right thing to do. “I felt I wasn’t writing about myself any more.” Perhaps some things are better left to the imagination after all. To make such a fundamental structural change at such a late stage was something he had never done before, and it underlines how volatile the material was for him. The new book was originally written in the first person, a technique Irving had used before – in A Prayer for Owen Meany, for example – but still a deliberate choice. After the book was finished and delivered to his publishers – the rumour is that it was the very next day – he took it back and rewrote all 800 pages from top to bottom in the third person, cutting about 25,000 words in the process.

“That would be the only excuse I could imagine to explain why he didn’t try to find me – because he was crazy.” To say the new book has been something of a watershed, then, is hugely to understate the case. As Janet Turnbull puts it, with touching pride: ” There’s been a turnaround here. He’s saying he was wrong about something and he has changed his mind about it.” Somewhere in the creative process, too, something cracked. Chris Blunt had also told Irving that John Wallace Blunt had been severely bipolar and had finished his life in more or less the same state as the fictional one Irving had invented, an eerie collision between real life and the world of the imagination. “It was disturbing to discover that my real father was crazy,” he reflects. “Why would I have imagined my father was insane?” And then, half gleeful at his own cleverness, half tearful at what it portends, he produces his own answer. But, in fact, Until I Find You had been in progress before that.

Typically for Irving, the plot details had been worked out before he began the main writing In that plot, Jack Burns finally finds his long-lost father. Irving is happy to disclose the plot, reasoning that no book of that length, which left the father unfound or dead, would be very satisfactory to read But the father is in a sanatorium, in effect insane. One of the pieces of information Chris Blunt gave when they met in 2001 was that their father had died in 1996. It would be tempting to conclude that that was what unblocked the dam and allowed Irving finally to let out the hurt he had held in for so long. If he had read that book, I don’t think he could have resisted making contact.” There is one further twist in the tale. And that, to me, is probable evidence that he did not know I was John Irving, the writer, or at least that he did not read that book. This was a detail that Irving deliberately used in the character of Wally the aviator in The Cider House Rules “It was an offering,” he explains.