This book has been around eight years in the making. It has taken
many forms in my head and almost never came out. Then one day I read an interview
with Irvine Welsh about how he had rescued material he had written over 20
years previous and ended up making it into a novel and so I thought I could.
The worry always for someone like me is I’m not Irvine Welsh and so anything I
do that’s not a sort of “big subject” type thing, I’ve no reason to believe anyone
will be the slightest bit interested in it. My only previous novel, The Last Pearl Diver, wasn’t a big seller but that there is
wrong. Who cares if it was? You don’t go into these things to make money. I
hardly made a penny from books until The
Asterisk Years came along. That puts a writer in a bad place in my view.
All my other books were written out of necessity (The ability to eat and keep
warm mainly) and then I had a book that sold an incredible amount for an
independent book. It takes your hunger away. Literally.
So I wanted to
challenge myself by breathing life into this book and seeing if I could
construct something that people would enjoy. It’s written in the first person
because that’s my original style, to write like I am talking to you in a bar.
There are graphic scenes and situations because that’s normally how real life
works. Most of the stuff I didn’t need to research as I knew the characters and
the streets and all I had to do was polish them, some mind, not all. I’m an
independent kind of guy, I don’t seek approval from anyone nor do I need to be
accepted anywhere. That’s not me raising a banner of revolution either, it’s just
how I am and how I have been brought up. I love real people and realism and so
that’s what I go for in my books
The IRA Block is out on June 1st
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