In Northern Ireland, from the late 70s to the early 90s, the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers.

But the man who often found, tortured and sometimes killed these people on behalf of the IRA

was himself an informer, a secret British army agent with the codename Stakeknife.

Who gets to play God? And why me? Why my family?

When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe?

I wouldn't even know where to start.

And I'm with the IRA.

Steakknife.

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Hello, today on open book, we're shouting to the top.

And much like Paul Weller, when he swapped the jam for the Style Council,

thinking about transformation.

Later, we'll be talking to debut novelists Natasha Brown and Anna Glenn Denning about two books which explore young women trying to reinvent themselves in London

and climbing or kicking away precarious social ladders.

And we'll hear from video games writer Greg Buchanan about respawning as a novelist.

But first, a rags to riches story about an American country boy made good,

written by a writer who made his own self-reinventing leap across the Atlantic.

Jonathan Lee's latest novel, The Great Mistake, charts the life of Andrew Haswell Green,

a surprisingly obscure historical figure who from humble beginnings would go on to be dubbed

the father of Greater New York, a name he earned by being behind some of the city's most

...