‘Through a Lens Darkly: Investigating “Reality” in The Village’ documents the process of rewriting my novel The Village. Organised into three sections, in addition to the full manuscript of the published novel itself, this thesis sets out to examine the ways in which I sought to represent a particular authorial reality in the final draft, after registering its absence in the first version of the book. The first section tackles the process of writing the first draft, the response from my editor, and a distillation of the flaws in the story-telling approach that I felt were preventing the text from having an authentic quality at that point. The second section documents the first part of my endeavour to correct this, through my search for telling detail within video and audio recordings of Sanganer (the North Indian ‘prison-village’ on which The Village is modelled). The third section focuses on the specific influence of three writers on the style and content of the final draft of the novel: Doris Lessing, James Salter and Daniyal Mueenuddin. I read Lessing for insight on tackling issues of exotica and colonialism within the text, Salter for the ability to create a diffuse, ambiguous point of view (in order to force the reader to engage with his or her own viewpoint), and Mueenuddin for techniques to create a powerful sense of place. I have given examples of the ways in which my engagement with these aspects of craft had impact on the final, published version of The Village. A short summary of the novel is given in the appendix at the end of this document. All references to The Village: a doctoral thesis are to the manuscript of the novel supplied as the second part of this manuscript.