Ian McGuire

And so we realize that he's being sent to Manchester basically as his last chance, that the Dublin police are tired of his drunkenness.

And they say they'll send him to Manchester and as a way of trying to encourage him to sort of dry out.

And that seems to be working through most of the novel.

But as a result of that, he's very much isolated within the city.

Because as an Irishman, he's not really trusted by the Manchester policeman.

He's seen as an outsider.

And so he becomes a very kind of isolated figure, trying to do his duty and trying to stop Athenians, but feeling very much disconnected from the rest of the law enforcement community.

I think the first novel that has to be beside it is probably Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, which I think is probably the earliest and one of the greatest attempts to understand the terrorist mind.

So The Secret Agent is a novel about a gang or group of anarchist terrorists in London in the early 20th century who are plotting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.

And it turns out that that has very tragic consequences.

But it's a brilliant novel about trying to think through political violence and what provokes it.

And it has this fantastic sort of motley gang of anarchists who meet in the back room of an Edwardian pornography shop and sort of debate vigorously their theories, how to bring down capitalism and how to create this kind of utopian alternative.

And there's a wonderful character who's a leader of them called The Professor, who is

who walks around with a bottle of nitroglycerine in his pocket in case he ever gets arrested and he's prepared to sort of blow himself up and the other people around him.

So it's a fantastic novel, but I actually read it when I was first thinking of this novel.

I read it and it was very helpful as a way of just beginning to move into this kind of idea of conspiracies and fanaticism and extremism and how to render that in a convincing way.

Yes and no, I suppose.

I mean, I don't think there are many Fenian novels.

So I had to, I mean, I read a lot of non-fiction and then I kind of, obviously, it's a work of imagination, a sense of trying to project yourself into these people's world.

I mean, one of the challenges for a historical novelist writing about