A Page in the Life: Peter Hoeg In his new novel, The Elephant Keepers" Children, Hoeg has created the Danish island of Fino, on which a pastor and his wife have also wiped the slate clean. They've disappeared into the coastal mist leaving their teenage children questioning whether their parents are con artists. A comic road trip ensues, taking in terrorist plots, and horse-sled chases. Culpability, both parental and authorial, is a subject that fascinates Hoeg. The book asks how well any of us know our parents and I ask if he had his own in mind. This was not in the foreground of my attention, but then, aren't we always questioning our own childhoods? I wonder if it's possible to tell any story which is not somehow drawing on our childhood. All the basic experiences of love and rejection, success and failure, are built into our first seven years. Like in all families, there were complications," he says. Although, he explains, his parents were not grifters. In the book, the children experience moments of shock-induced transcendentalism called "The Door." Hoeg stepped through just such a portal in his mid-twenties. Growing up I sailed rich people's sailing boats. On one occasion, I was crossing the Atlantic and we came to the Azores," he says. I could feel something was happening. I didn't know what. So the others went to have a beer and I went to an old part of Ponta Delgada. I was sitting on a bench for an hour and then the world somehow changed, and the mind changed. It was a kind of open happiness without reason. I knew I had encountered something that life was about. It had nothing to do with religion, with any gods. It was a basic possibility for all human beings. His reputation as a recluse is, he claims, misleading. I felt from the first book, The History of Danish Dreams, that there was a danger, some possible dilemma between my natural wish for a drawn-back life and the larger audience and the media. So I started from then placing filters: protecting my life, having a secret address and having a secret phone number. He also affirms his love for Denmark. "I feel privileged and happy with the protection and the smallness and the economic stability," he says. When Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow became a global success and spawned a Hollywood film, he had a structure in place, even if parameters were stretched. There were some situations when suddenly TV reporters found me and just opened the door and started to film, or foreign publishers were sending private detectives. He says the Danish literary world is a quiet one. Books are a very slowly posed question. What is dangerous is when energy starts coming to you in the form of attention or money or power. It doesn't belong to you," says Hoeg. He was shocked by the reaction to The Quiet Girl, a multilayered philosophical thriller about a gambling clown with a Bach obsession. I know it was a difficult book, but the amount of information you have to process to understand the first of the Matrix films or Memento or Inception, the number of different levels you have to work on... my book is nothing compared to that. By comparison The Elephant Keepers" Children is a straight quest narrative. The result is a happier story and, it appears, a happier author. "There's more tolerance around the characters, and there's more humour and maybe a little more warmth," he says with a smile. That is, in a way, where I would like my life to move. So if I have succeeded in that, it indicates that life is moving in an OK direction. The Elephant Keepers" Children (Harvill Secker, £17.99) is available from the Telegraph for £15.99 (plus £1.35 p&p)