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. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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Today we look at double lives and anti-heroes who meld the personal with the political as we meet a spook in search for revolution, the women who refuse to let their bodices rip,

and the lasting influence of the Scottish modernist classic Lanark.

We kick off with the author Vietan Ngu, whose 2015 debut, The Sympathiser,

about a Vietnamese army captain turned communist double agent, took 20 years to write and ended up

winning a Pulitzer. Tanwin's new novel, The Committed, follows the journey of this same nameless protagonist

as he arrives in Paris as a refugee in 1981. The narrator, traumatised by memories of his

torture at a re-education camp, soon finds himself swept up in a gangland world of drugs, violence and internecine street warfare.

But Tanwin is not averse to the odd philosophical disquisition. In this novel, even the

brothel bouncer reads Voltaire. And that sets the tone for a book of big ideas about colonialism,

ideology and generational upheaval.

The Committed is the second installment of a planned trilogy. And when I spoke to Viet, I asked him if that had always been the plan.

Oh, absolutely not. I had no idea what I was doing. I just wanted to write a novel with the sympathizer. And when I got to the end, what happened was, of course, that my agent said,

so what's next?

So I said, I've got to write another book.

Might as well be a sequel.

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