Matt Cooper

Because what you explain brilliantly in the book is about the importance of maps and how in that period...

So many of the things that would have been noted and measured and put down into this graphical form were gone, disappeared.

Which is why Tomás, your central character, was employed because as well as being able to draw the maps, he could speak to the locals and get the information.

Like, stolen.

And that's what comes out really strongly as well.

I think people will be really taken by almost the casual nature in which the names of places, the Irish names, were erased, anglicised.

Even Tomás is known as Tommy to his British paymasters.

There's an awful lot as well, almost casual cruelty depicted in the book.

Even, again, one of the central characters as a young girl, her name is changed when she's thrown into the workhouse.

Without any regard for the fact that she has a name that she was given and that people might come back for her.

The cruelty as well of the coffin ship being sent off to Australia, children being in the bottom of this boat.

It's actually quite shocking.

Were you shocked when you went back to discover about this era, to bring it to the page?

Well, I got the impression it wasn't even just a slip-up.

It was just that people didn't care.

Yeah.

And people didn't care for the poor and the starving.

Did you get angry as you researched as to what had happened?

What did it do for your own sense of Irishness?

I mean, you were born in Derry, but your parents were from the south, weren't they?