Ian McGuire

The things she has to say are really fascinating as well.

So she's a real, yeah, someone I very much admire.

I'm not sure if I necessarily place myself in a tradition.

I mean, if there is a tradition I place myself in, it would be kind of Northern, Northern English writing, but that's a kind of uncertain tradition, I suppose.

I mean, a novel, which, which has always been kind of important to me and which, which I drew on actually my first novel, which, which is very different from the abstainer, but is set in a kind of fictionalized Manchester area.

is Dickens' Hard Times, which is set just outside Manchester in one of the, probably in Preston, although he calls it Coke Town.

And it's about a strike in a textile mill.

So it's one of the kind of formative novels of industrial novels.

I mean, Manchester was the first industrial city and Dickens writes about

those changes and the dangers he sees in those changes.

So certainly it's a kind of Manchester novel, and that's one which has lived with me for a long time.

Well, The Mirror and the Light definitely was kind of my highlight.

I read a novel that's been out for a while now, but which I was kind of surprised by and really loved was Edna O'Brien's Girl about the...

Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria, which I was very impressed by that.

I mean, I sort of thought it's a very risky novel for a white Irish woman to sort of place herself within this

young Nigerian girl's perspective.

And it could have failed in so many ways, but I think she really manages to pull it off and do things which are sort of surprising and moving with that novel.

So that's a novel which I was maybe, I wasn't sure that I was going to like it, but I ended up liking it a great deal.

I'm slightly oddly at the moment reading

D.H.