Prince performing at Wembley Arena, London, on the Parade tour, 1986. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

You’re writing almost as much for cinema and TV as you are novels now, from Brooklyn to Love , Nina and State of the Union . In which medium do you feel most at home? NADWORNY: Hornby says he started to make the connection a couple of years ago, when Prince's the "Sign O' The Times" box set came out. Is thinking at all equivalent to doing? Some writers say that the time you spend thinking about what you’re writing is still writing time. You’re almost as prolific a writer as your two heroes – does writing come easily to you? It feels as though it must. What a talent, what a career, what a life, and what a treat to relive it all with this most down-to-earth of demigods.Nearly everybody who had any time for him lost sight of him during this period. There were countless albums, and it was impossible to tell whether they were any good or not, because nobody seemed to write about them or talk about them. Eventually he found out what the rest of his colleagues discovered much later in the digital revolution: that the only money to be made was in live shows. He made peace with his past and reminded people what a breathtaking performer he was, first with a spectacular spot at the Grammys co-starring Beyoncé́, and then, in 2007, with the greatest half-time Super Bowl show in history. That same year he played 21 nights at the 20,000-capacity O2 Arena in London. After flirting with bankruptcy at the end of the 90s, Prince became rich again. HORNBY: Well, Prince never stopped recording. He woke up in the morning, and he recorded. And there is an estimate that there's enough - a new album every six months for the next 40 years or something, everything that's in his vault that wasn't released. He recorded too much for his record company. And he went on these tours, which, once he'd finished the show, his people would have found him somewhere else to play. So the show's finished at 11, and then it starts another one at 1 in the morning and play a two or three-hour show with the band. That's when he did a lot of cover versions, and it was much looser. But yeah, who does a show after they've done a show and then wakes up in the morning and records 20 songs? There have been four movie or TV adaptations of Great Expectations in the past decade, including the Indian film Fitoor, and Armando Iannucci’s brilliant The Personal History of David Copperfield, with a marvellous colourblind cast. Claire Foy played Amy Dorrit before she was old enough to play the Queen, for the BBC; there is simply no counting (I have tried) the number of 21st-century adaptations of A Christmas Carol across all media – animated films, puppet dramas, the works. Dev Patel in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy The first edition of the serial version of Oliver Twist, published from 1837. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Whichever one I’m not doing at the time. The other one always looks a much better prospect when you’re in the middle of something tough.

I also was grateful to learn that, in all his exhaustive research, Hornby found that, with the exception of Sinead O’Connor’s account of a hellish night she spent with him, Prince was overall an ally to women. Evidence of this (of which there is plenty) made me feel better about still being a Prince fan, because shew…it’s a dwindling list of artists we can still admire full-stop, is it not? This pairing—two magnificent creatives, centuries and genres apart— makes stunning sense in the hands of their wisest, wittiest fan.” — People Meanwhile Prince is effectively alive, as far as his recording career goes. Postmortem, we have been given special editions of Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times, a solo demos album called Piano & a Microphone 1983, and an album called Originals . At the same time, a team of archivists have moved his vault from Paisley Park to a climate-controlled Iron Mountain storage facility in Los Angeles. Nobody knows how much material is in the vault, but the estimates range from 5,000 to 8,000 unreleased songs, or a 10-song album every six months for the next 300-400 years. I’ll bet there are some good ones in there. Prince’s death was foretold, too. A few days before he died, his private plane had to make an emergency landing in Illinois after a concert in Atlanta, and he was reportedly given a shot of the anti-overdose drug Narcan by local emergency services. The night before he died, someone on his staff phoned a doctor in California called Howard Kornfeld who specialised in treating addictions. Because he was unable to respond immediately himself, he sent his son Andrew, a colleague at his practice, to Minneapolis that night. But when Prince overdosed for the second time that week, he was found dead in his own private elevator, on his private estate, too far away from everybody, too hidden, to receive the magic shot. Prince and Beyoncé at the 2004 Grammy awards. Photograph: Gary Hershorn/ReutersHORNBY: And she was horrified. But he kind of shrugged and lived with it. And he liked the way it sounded. And that's exactly how it is on the album. And at the moment it’s hard to see Prince fading away, especially if he releases two good albums a year for the next few centuries. Look at the photographs taken of him towards the end of his life, and you don’t see a man in his 50s. He looks at least 20 years older.

In this joyous and illuminating book, the million-copy bestselling author brings together an unlikely pairing to explore the story of their creative genius And Hornby’s project — looking for commonalities between apparently disparate entities — is an endeavor we probably all out to be doing much more of in these days when, to quote Prince, “You turn on the telly and every other story / Is tellin’ you somebody died.” Sign o’ the times, indeed.

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Hornby’s admiration for his subjects is infectious… a zesty tribute to two cultural legends not often spoken about in the same breath.” —Publishers Weekly