‘… a conversation emerged that returned on several occasions to the themes of communication and representation, their inevitable failures and the persistent, urgent necessity to pursue some form of apotheosis through language. We talked. We waited. No conclusions.’
David Haughey asked me a lot of in-depth, insightful questions in this interview in the latest edition of The Honest Ulsterman.
I’ve written a piece for the LRB blog about tracing a family connection in Samuel Beckett’s letters, and how that became the seed for a story…
I’ve done a short interview with the novelist Ruadh Butler. Instead of questions, Ruadh uses quotations from well-known writers — in my case leading to ramblings about David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf, among others…
Here’s two minutes and forty-one seconds of me telling you what Jott is about…
Video by James Carney of Unseen Things.
My new book Jott will be published by John Murray on 16th June 2018.
In February of 1935, two young Irishmen walk in the grounds of a London mental hospital. Arthur Bourne, a junior psychiatrist, is about to jeopardise his future for his closest friend, an aspiring writer called Louis Molyneux.
Arthur has been overshadowed since childhood by his brilliant, troubled friend. But after years of playing the unassuming companion, he is learning that loyalty has its costs: that old friendship may thwart new love, and perhaps even blur distinctions between the sane and the mad…
Jott is a story about friendship, madness and modernism from the author of Communion Town.
