I remember being on a demonstration at Brize Norton air base, and the whistle went to sit down in the road and be arrested, but somehow I managed to sit with my bum on the pavement and my feet in the gutter rather than in the middle of the road.

And by the time the police had arrested everyone in the middle of the road and reached me, I had my feet up on the pavement too.

Though largely set in the curiously featureless landscape of Britain in 2024, it also has substantial flashbacks to Texas in 2006, and an idealistic but bungled attempt to stage a headline-grabbing protest against George W Bush by disrupting his wife's speech to a children's literary festival.

Laura Bush – who, despite never quite meeting her over the garden fence in Austin, Crace admits he is disposed to believe isn't quite as supine as she has been painted ("she dated a Democrat and married Bush on the rebound") – ends up on the floor with blood pouring out of her nose.

And this slight, gently spoken man is clearly more comfortable discussing his adopted city's unfashionable reputation or his former career as a "middling" journalist than he is the string of novels that have brought him acclaim around the world.

These have tackled big, eternal themes such as life and death, God and Darwin.

"With Lermon, I have been around left-wing politics for long enough to recognise that there is a psychopathy there.So where does he sit in this political clash between Lermon's direct-action conviction politics and Lessing's vacillating cowardice dressed up as polite good sense?Lessing, I suggest, is one of the most perfectly drawn but fundamentally unappealing characters I have come across in a long time.All That Follows is an unashamedly political book and, in that sense, marks something of a departure for Crace. "I wanted to lose myself for a bit and I felt I could afford to be reckless.I wanted to see whether I could pull off a book where I do the things which I don't normally do well. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. And so I thought, 'I want to have a stab at that.'" While successful writers will happily talk about wanting to try new things rather than repeat the same old formula, it is rare to find anyone making a short-list of their failings quite so bluntly as Crace does.Lessing had been part of it, but was tagging along more out of lust for Lermon's girlfriend, Nadia, than because of any radical conviction.When it came to the crunch, he bottled out, and has remained a coward ever after, albeit one with a buried grudge against Lermon for placing his spinelessness in such sharp focus.And I recognise that psychopathy to some extent in me, running in parallel with my timidity." The two men, then, both reflect aspects of his own character."When I was younger," he remembers, "I wanted to be brave politically, but I wasn't.As far as I knew, it wasn't an offence to be on the pavement." At least, he reflects with a warm laugh, he is now being politically courageous as a writer. Will it follow the direction of All That Follows, or return to more familiar territory? Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.The latter, he confirms, and then adds – very casually – that it will be his last book. I will have written 12 novels when I finish this next book and it's enough. Too often bitterness is the end product of a writing career. And I know that I am just as likely to turn bitter as anyone else.He has never been one to generate headlines by sounding off in public or on literary stages.Indeed, his profile is so low here that a Scottish paper recently referred to him as "the cult American writer"."I was terrified because I knew that meeting her would have made a perfect circle.In the book I had just finished, I had given Laura a bloody nose. And all the time she was next door – that sat uneasily on my conscience." The novel in question, All That Follows, is out this week and features Mrs Bush in a cameo as the victim of a violent assault.