Our latest daily festival podcast sets sail for Ireland, with writers from north and south whose characters are caught up in the tides of history.
Donal Ryan, who won the Guardian first book award in 2013 with The Spinning Heart, returns to County Tipperary for his second. The Thing About December is set almost 10 years earlier as the Celtic Tiger leaps into overdrive and charts a year in the life of Johnsey Cunliffe. He explains how Johnsey grabbed him by the arm, how even in the middle of the boom Ireland's sudden riches always seemed to chafe and how he wrote the novel in three-hour bursts, the outlines of which can still be glimpsed on the page.
Michèle Forbes looks back a little further with her debut, Ghost Moth, a novel which conjures up Belfast at the dawn of the Troubles in 1969 and follows the trail of memory back to the heady days of 1949. She tells us how the constrictions of the past proved to be fertile territory for a novel of secrets and describes how the book's looping trajectories emerged through a process of composition which calls to mind Anne Tyler's way of "knitting a novel".
Reading list
The Thing About December by Donal Ryan (Black Swan)
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan (Black Swan)
Ghost Moth by Michèle Forbes (Phoenix)
