Sy-Quia wasn’t raised in the Catholic faith. Yet, in telling her grandparents’ story in the novel, she effortlessly gives such an impression of being au fait with Catholicism, and all its arcane practices and curious rules, that I find myself talking to her as if to a fellow believer.

There are those moments when a strange coincidence or overlap, if we keep an open mind, can hint that there is more to life than meets the eye. And so it was, at midnight one September evening in 2023, when the award-winning poet Stephanie Sy-Quia (her Filipino surname is pronounced, she tells me, like a Radio 4 presenter introducing our Prime Minister as “Sir Keir”) had pressed send and despatched to her agent the final, final draft of her first novel, A Private Man. Just three hours later, her beloved grandmother, Margaret Bendelow, died at the age of 96. The novel tells the story of Margaret’s marriage in 1965 – the year the Second Vatican Council ended – to Catholic priest Fr David Collier.

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