In her 2000 short-fiction collection, Nights in a Foreign Country, Jean McNeil included a story called “Eel Fishing,” built around a young woman’s memories of fishing for eels with her father. For McNeil, eels are a powerful symbol of dedication and endurance, with their urge to travel great distances. “That migration hit close to home because, of course, I’m a migrant,” says the author, who was raised in Cape Breton but as an adult has lived mostly in London, England. “So I was interested in creatures that fling themselves across space listening to some inner message, which is in their case sparked by instinct. As was mine.”

Even as she wrote “Eel Fishing,” McNeil imagined the situation and theme fanning out, expanding to cover a larger canvas. And with her new novel, The Interpreter of Silences (due out this month from McArthur & Company), she’s now back with the eels. Not that the novel is a straight reworking of the earlier story; the two don’t share any specific characters or details. But they do share a Cape Breton setting, a complicated father-daughter dynamic, and a sense of personal upheaval. And, of course, an eel motif. It’s clear that for McNeil, Interpreter was a chance to get back to some unfinished business.

I meet up with the author in London, at her office at the Latin American Bureau, a research and publishing organization where she works as a director and publisher. She wears dark-framed glasses and tucks her trousers into cowboy boots, and is a diminutive presence in this airy, high-ceilinged room off Rosebery Avenue.

McNeil, who turns 38 this year, is eager to talk about her new book, the nature of fiction, and what she’s learned on her recent travels, but is uneasy when the focus is on her. “Are you trying to see if I’m a real Cape Bretoner?” she replies after I ask how much time she’s spent there recently. She’s very reluctant to discuss herself or her family; she mentions relatives in Halifax and Cape Breton and leaves it at that.

She has been in the U.K. for nearly 16 years, though her time here has been broken up by many forays into Latin America, where, among other projects, she wrote Costa Rica: The Rough Guide. Her latest adventure was a visit to Antarctica, and she’ll be returning there soon in an effort to finish an array of projects – some poetry, some fiction, some non-fiction, some radio work. There is mystery in this kind of wafting travel, a process that even McNeil doesn’t fully understand. “If you work on instinct, you don’t precisely know what’s driving you,” she says.

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It was instinct that led McNeil back to Cape Breton for Interpreter. “I needed a small place where things would be magnified and time would move in an odd manner – contract and expand – because it often does in small places,” she says. “Cape Breton worked for so many reasons.” A particular spot even sprang to her mind, a patch so small it doesn’t even qualify as a town. “It’s nearby where I grew up, [but] it’s not exactly where I grew up,” says McNeil. “That would be too claustrophobic for me.”

Interpreter tells the story of Eve, a slightly embittered fashionista working on the fringes of the Toronto scene who returns to her childhood home when her father starts showing signs of illness. Back in Cape Breton, she must contend with her father’s ornery ways, a chippy elder sister, and a diary left behind by her mother.

This is McNeil’s first novel set in Canada since her 1996 debut, Hunting Down Home. Writing from away, she has learned, is double-edged. An absent writer can’t draw on a place’s abundant firsthand detail, or benefit from full immersion into the motions of everyday life. But the distance also forced McNeil to reimagine Cape Breton, to work harder to gather the small shreds of life that come spontaneously to others. Now, when she does return to the island, she’s acutely aware of details that might be ignored by the locals. The exotic reveals itself. “Little things – newspaper headlines, English and French down to every last detail in the packaging,” she says. “These are the details [that] others take for granted.” The novel provides an exile’s intimate view of its setting.

Still, McNeil does not strain for verisimilitude above all else. Some of the places named in the latest book don’t exist, and there’s no longer any significant eel fishery in Cape Breton. “A lot of people make the assumption you don’t know what you’re talking about because you’re getting the facts wrong,” McNeil says. “But fiction is after all fiction…. There’s a current in Canadian culture where people want things to be very literal, especially in the regional aspect of the country.”

One element McNeil has not fictionalized is the social change that forms the backdrop to the struggles of her characters. “I grew up living a 19th-century life technologically,” says McNeil. Even in the 1970s, her family scythed the fields and lived on a subsistence farm, hunting and fishing and shooting. “Yes, you had a car to go to town, but that was one of the few incursions of the so-called modern world,” she says now. “Cape Breton has changed very quickly.”

In Interpreter, those changes are set against personal turbulence, a “terrible ambush,” in one resonant phrase from the novel. Eve is separated from her husband, dealing with an aging father who may be suffering from Alzheimer’s, and finding herself drawn to her neighbour, a visiting American with a girlfriend. “Despite their best instincts, desires, intents, people come up against some things that are terrible, insurmountable,” says McNeil. “And yes, love can be a terrible ambush. One of the worst there is going.”

Indeed, the book is not optimistic on the subject of relationships, and McNeil suggests that this reflects some aspects of her own life, though she won’t get into specifics. “I felt there was an urgent matter at hand [in writing the novel], which was to try to grapple with these issues of fate and desire…. Because of my own experience in the few years it took me to write it, it changed and became, some people might say, darker.”

What was happening?

“Just personal situations.”

There is a pause. McNeil may not want to go any further, but she also doesn’t want to leave me hanging. “I didn’t get hit by a car. The same sorts of things that come through in the book – people’s emotional debts to each other. What happens when we are brutally honest with each other.”

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Interpreter represents a minor milestone for McNeil in that it’s the first of her four books of fiction to be published by a Canadian house. Hunting Down Home, her debut, originated with Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the U.K., as did Nights in a Foreign Country and her 2002 novel, Private View, a satire on the London art scene. But that firm declined to pick up Interpreter; one London agent says “a certain ennui amongst U.K. publishers” has set in when it comes to Canadian-set fiction, adding that houses are now more interested in larger-canvas stories.

So the novel found a home in Canada instead, when a former editor passed it on to McArthur & Company. (It was a natural choice: McArthur is the Canadian sales agent and distributor for W&N parent company Orion, and had handled the Governor General’s Award-nominated Private View.) Now, the firm faces the challenge of promoting a very Canada-centric book by an author who lives an ocean away. McNeil will not be visiting Canada this spring, but McArthur’s vice-president of publicity, Janet Harron, is planning to line up several fall appearances. “We wanted to bring [the book] out in the spring in order to keep it front and centre in people’s minds throughout the year and give us a big run-up to the fall season,” says Harron.

The fall tour may include several appearances in the Maritimes, which could set up an interesting collision of cultures for McNeil. “I don’t think I’ve ever been at an event surrounded by Maritime writers,” she admits. “Even in the way I speak, people [in Canada] think I’m English. It’s rather hysterical because people [in England] know I’m North American within three or four words.”

And what would it take for her voice to revert back to its Canadian tones?

“I’d have to spend more than a month there.”