The deer was still alive when Michel Faber first saw it. He was cycling north on the A9 at the time. It was running along on the far side of the road.

There was a car coming the other way. Red, he remembers. The same make as the one his character Isserley drives in his first novel Under the Skin; a little invasion of his imagination into the real world.

And then the deer jumped onto the road right in front of it. "Instantly killed," Faber says. "Whomp. I could tell the deer was dead in that second you have to react."

Not that he had a second to react. "The body of the deer was shot across the road into the path of the bicycle. I hit it, catapulted over the handlebars. Landed on my left arm and my palm and miraculously was not hit by other cars coming the other way. Miraculously, I didn't break any bones." He rubs his left arm. "I might have a hairline fracture."

This happened just over a week before we meet. It is the first story he tells me when I arrive at his house, this house of books and records and dust and cobwebs and memories.

Yes, he is in some discomfort. He may have torn ligaments. Pulling the ring pull on the cat food tin is painful, he says. But, he says, it reminds him of something he wrote in his latest novel, The Book of Strange New Things. "The miracle of the body. What it does."

He shows me his hand. It is scabbed and pink, the colour of new skin. "When I first injured myself this palm was completely abraded. Blood everywhere. Bits of skin hanging off. This is what? Like, eight days after or something? That's what the body does for us."

He rubs his arm again. "Shouldn't you be wearing something on that?" I ask. "On the first day I wore the same sling that Eva wore when she broke her arm when the cancer ate through the bone."

The miracle of the body. What it does.

To meet Michel Faber I travel north to Inverness and then north again. An alien land to a lowlander like me. It must have been for him once too. Faber came to Ross and Cromarty from Australia with his wife Eva and her children near the start of the nineties. It was here he became an author, a published one at any rate (he wrote his first novel when he was eight or nine).

He has spent the last two decades writing seven vivid, strange, dark novels such as Under the Skin (his emigration novel) and The Crimson Petal And The White.

Coming to Scotland was his second emigration. As a child his parents had taken him from Holland to Australia. He has retained his Australian accent. And maybe his Australian default settings.

"Eva and I both grew up in Australia and we were both very no-bullshit people, so I'm accustomed to conversations of great frankness. I'm not into English delicacy."

Throughout our conversation he will say "when Eva died". Never "when Eva passed."

A year after her death, he still lives in this large, messy house. Swallows nest in the eves. It doesn't feel so much sad as empty (despite the detritus of the couple's lives being all around us).

He was with Eva for 26 years. Her absence couldn't be anything but present in our conversation.

On the train here I read the last pages of The Book Of Strange New Things, which is now out in paperback. It is a potent, painful novel set on another world while looking back at this one. It's about a marriage under strain and two people being torn apart. It is a heart-breaking book, even if you don't know the circumstances of its creation.

A few chapters into writing it Eva was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that grows in the bone marrow. She died last summer, having spent the last six months in a London hospital. Faber spent the last three months living "24/7" in the room with her. The novel, then, carries a weight.

"We obviously knew it would be the last book I finished in her lifetime," Faber says as we sit in his cluttered office. "That became very clear as her illness progressed. And once she was dying during the final year of the book's composition it was very clear that if I could get the book finished at all before she died it would be finished pretty much at the same time as she was finished. It added a very strange aura to the book and very much influenced what the book ended up being about.

"When I first conceived it, it was mainly going to be very much about distance; the distance between people living in different realities, different emotional planets if you like. And I was interested in that dynamic which I think you find in a lot of relationships where the writer goes into their sanctum sanctorum and produces art and the partner keeps the world at bay."

A nurturing dynamic that described his own relationship with Eva, he admits.

"And of course as Eva got ill it became much more about our bodies and the fragility of these vehicles that we inhabit. And about loss. It's a book about loss. Loss of everything. Loss of every conceivable kind."

He hopes that those who read it will find some consolation in it, "because it looks into the heart of darkness and it's unflinching. But at the same time it's very compassionate and tender."

Is it consoling for you, Michel? "No. I am consoled by the fact that I managed to finish it while she was still alive because she was very invested in the book and very upset when I was telling her in the last couple of years before she died that I wasn't going to be able to finish it. She was very relieved and satisfied and proud that I managed to finish it. That it was good."

Now, he says: "I want to do my best to help the book find readers. That's why I'm talking to you. That's why I'm doing events. I think Eva would have wanted me to do that.

"She was worried that after she died I would just hide away in my little burrow here, databasing my MP3s and sorting through my comics and graphic novels and all the rest of it because those are the sorts of activities you can do for 25 hours a day. She was worried that I would lose all contact with the outside world.

"I've really tried to work in the year since her death. I've gone out there. I went to the USA only three months after she died. It was very weird obviously, but that was when the American publishers needed me to go."

Faber said last year that this will be his last novel. I wonder if in the time since Eva's death circumstances have changed. "Circumstances have only confirmed that," he says.

They wrote the books together, he says. He would write a chapter, she would read it and give him detailed feedback. "It was a lovely thing that we shared and she was very influential on how the books turned out, so, given that that's gone, that's yet another reason why I feel that era is over.

"I do think it's enough. It's a nice body of work, it's very varied. They're all substantial books. I'm proud of all of them.

"I would be completely astonished if I ever wrote another novel. I think it is highly, highly unlikely."

There are other things he wants to do now. He's working on a biography of Eva. Not for publication. He wants to do something with her art and he wants to finish her short stories. He's writing poetry too.

He reads me some of them. They are full of desperate intimate details from her last days. They are full of love too. "They are very frank, very direct," he admits. There is no anger in them, I suggest. No real anger in the book either. Towards the disease at any rate. "Eva didn't have anger towards the disease. I want to show you some of the artwork that she did …"

He sorts through a pile of stuff to find it. "When she got very ill, she had very bad neuropathy in her hands. She couldn't really hold pencils anymore. She was still doing artwork. She did this some weeks before she died, when we were still hoping for remission."

He shows me an image of a red river full of fish. "For her, the cancer cells were always fish in her bloodstream, alien fish that didn't belong there. At this point she was hoping for remission but she sensed the fish were growing underneath the surface.

"This was the second-last piece she did," he says, showing me another. "The fish have grown to whale size."

If she couldn't hold a pencil, I ask, how could she manage this intricate, fully realised art? "Just force of will."

He shows me the last painting Eva finished. To me it looks as if she has drawn herself in the belly of a whale. As if the illness has consumed her. Maybe, Faber suggests, or maybe she's swimming alongside it. "Either way, the whale is not an evil creature. You can see that in the way she's rendered it. The whale is doing what whales do. And that's how she saw the cancer as well. The cancer was just doing what cancers do. She very much wanted to stay alive and she did what she could to stay alive, but she wasn't angry at her fate."

Was he? At times, he says. He tells me of an evening in the hospital. The disease had attacked the nerves in Eva's eyes and she couldn't see properly at this point.

"I just lost it," he remembers. "I was just so aggrieved at the unfairness of what was happening to her given that she had been such a lovely, kind, nurturing, supportive person all her life and she was being humiliated in so many ways by this disease and I just expressed the unfairness of it."

The TV was on that night. The news. A report about people fleeing Syria. Eva couldn't see it but she could hear and she pointed out that on the screen tens of thousands of people's lives had just been turned into hell overnight. None of them, she told him, deserved that; the destruction of their homes, the deaths of family members.

"Yes, okay, it was a valid point for her to make," he says. "But we're all selfish human beings and our own lives are paramount."

In the house Michel Faber grew up in Australia, there were no more than a dozen books. His parents weren't great readers. He remembers an Italian book of short stories, a copy of The Joy of Sex, wrapped in wallpaper and a pulp novel about a Nazi concentration camp. His father's book. "I think he had this book because he had a guilty conscience. He was in the German army during the war. He was a Dutch Nazi and he joined the wrong army."

Faber wasn't close to his parents. "I think if my father were alive now I'd probably have an interesting relationship with him. But he died in the eighties so that door is closed. My mother is in a nursing home in Australia and she has quite advanced Alzheimer's now, so whatever conversations I've had with her I've had and there's no more to be had.

"They were both very damaged from the war. Eva's parents (also European emigrants) were both very damaged from the war. When I first met Eva I was trying to figure out why I felt such a rapid and deep bond with her and instinctively I thought 'you've been through the war too'. And then I did the maths and thought 'that's absurd'. But actually it's not so absurd. Because children of Europeans who went through the Nazi era, they absorb it in the mother's milk."

They met in Melbourne, after the end of Faber's first marriage and as hers was coming to an end. Not a rancorous break-up in her case. In fact her ex-husband came with them to Scotland and set up house close by for the children. Faber says he would have followed her anywhere. He has never cared where he lives.

Then again, his reason for living in this particular house has gone now. He'd like to move. "For a number of reasons. Firstly, since Eva died I've had some unwelcome attention from females who clearly feel that there is a vacancy and I feel very vulnerable here.

"It's very impractical. When Eva and I lived together we were like a little nation of two. We had everything we needed. She was a fantastic cook. We had all the intellectual stimulation. The books, the comics, the music, the sex; it was all in this house and we generated it together. But with her gone I'm in the middle of nowhere, I don't drive, it's bitter in winter, the nearest place I can buy food is four miles down the road and I can get run over by a deer on the A9. It's not very practical."

Is he a different person now that he is alone? "I'm very different now that Eva is dead. By necessity I have to be much more social. Now that she's dead I feel almost as if I'm carrying her with me. I've tried to treat people the way she would have treated them. Christians have this thing: 'what would Jesus do?' Well, I've almost got a 'what would Eva do?' relationship with the world now. I say yes to a lot of things I would previously say no to."

Michel, I ask, does grief teach us anything. That we need to value what we've got, he says. This planet. Our bodies, the vehicles we are incarnated in.

"It is tempting to get obsessed with loads of things that don't matter and are not going to matter to us at all when we're dying. I mean, 98 per cent of what we're concerning ourselves with in our daily lives … It's not going to mean shit when we're dying.

"One of the wonderful things about Eva is she did not postpone fulfilment. She didn't think 'I'll do this when I retire.' She did it now and that meant that even though her life was tragically cut short and she died in a very horrible way from a very horrible cancer she didn't have that boatload of regrets that so many people have. 'If only I had done this when I had the chance.' She did it while she had the chance and I think we should all do it while we have the chance."

We leave the house. Eventually we will all leave of course. That's the end of every story, isn't it?

Michel Faber will appear at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Thursday at 8.45pm. The Book of Strange New Things is published by Canongate.