Sofie Laguna is still a bit jetlagged. A few days ago, she returned from a family holiday in Rome, London and Ireland, so when we sit outside in the surprisingly warm Melbourne sunshine to talk about her latest novel, she is reminded of a strange experience in the Italian capital.

She saw two old women drinking coffee in a piazza and had the bizarre feeling that they could have been two characters from her latest novel, The Underworld , in some sort of later life.

She was thrilled to be in Rome because so much of the book is immersed in the classical world, albeit from the perspective of the 1970s. There wasn’t an equivalent feeling in the “dream landscape” of the rugged and isolated west coast of Ireland, nor in London, where a visit to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre had Laguna, who stud

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