For three years from 1988, he lived in a Notting Hill flat (rented from publisher friend Margaret Busby): "I brought the first draft of "The Famished Road" with me and that flat was where I began rewriting it... Something about my writing changed round about that time. I acquired a kind of tranquillity. I had been striving for something in my tone of voice as a writer — it was there that it finally came together... That flat is also where I wrote the short stories that became Stars of the New Curfew."