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…

Jott was published on Saturday. We had a launch at the Belfast Book Festival — pictured below, small guests treating the event with the appropriate attention and seriousness. There are a few more pictures here.

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.