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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Today, to discuss queer nature writing, I'm joined by the writers Philip Hoare and Mike Parker,

and we discuss podcasts turning into books. But we begin with the Irish writer Kevin Barry,

whose pioneering prize-winning previous novels have marked him out as one of a new generation of Irish writers eager to break from tradition.

City of Bahain is a dystopian love story and Beetlebone imagines John Lennon escaping in a moment of crisis to the wild west coast of Ireland.

His latest, nightboat to Tangier, follows in similarly blackly comic vein, marrying a Samuel Beckett-styled waiting game between two aging Irish gangsters with musings on love, loss, drug running and

parenthood. Let's hear a description from the book of that criminal pair.

Morris Hearn's jaunty, crooked smile will appear with frequency.

His left eye is smeared and dead,

the other oddly bewitched as though it an excessive life for balance.

He wears a shabby suit, an open-necked black shirt, white runners, and a derby hat perched high in the back of his head,

doodish at one time, certainly, but past it now.

Charlie Redmond.

The face somehow has an antique look.

...