Cassie McCullagh

Well, that's true.

I think Irish writing has such a high standard in general for such a small nation.

I was thinking in comparison to other Irish writers, I suspect...

It helped he was Graham Norton to get it published was my view.

And I also thought it needed a little bit more work in parts.

There was a couple of times where, for example, we suddenly left the point of view of one character and jumped into another character, which I think by accident rather than design came

because we never came back to that.

It was a couple of paragraphs.

So there's a couple of editing stuff there that I thought needed to be a bit tighter.

And I thought that was a shame because I thought his general conversational style is a really easy style to read.

And this is sort of the book that you could pick up a summer holiday read and it's enjoyable.

Well, he was a fascinating character.

Just going back to something that you said before, I actually wondered if this whole book was actually told by Will.

So if at the start of the book you think you've got the three narratives from the three characters...

I did wonder as we went through whether it was actually Will talking on behalf of the other two characters and hence some of the unreliability and probably the most unreliable is John Leal.

He's a character who claims that he's had experiences in North Korea prison camps.

He managed to escape them quite fantastically by his own telling and has come back again

And is kind of setting himself up to be a bit of a messiah, even walking around barefoot with, is it the bottom sort of two inches of his feet are continually black?

Yeah, so black as part of this.

And as a result, he's appealing to these characters who, as you've said, are so very damaged that they're coming to him in an