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. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Stories of dislocation, isolation and empowerment

with a strong feminist flavour on Open Book this week.

And we begin with the booker-nominated author of The Blazing World,

Siri Hustved, who's taken her penchant for mining her own life

to extremes with a new novel masquerading as the memoir of a writer called

S.H. Years ago, I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan

to find the hero of my first novel.

When I arrived in August of 1978, he was not a character so much as a rhythmic possibility,

an embryonic creature of my imagination,

which I felt as a series of metrical beats that quickened and slowed with my steps as I navigated the streets of the city. I didn't know then what I know now. As I wrote, I was also being

written. The book had been started long before I left the plains. Multiple drafts of a mystery

had already been inscribed in my brain, but that didn't mean I knew how it would turn out.

My unformed hero and I were headed for a place that was little more than a gleaming fiction. The future.

The author reading from her latest novel, Memories of the Future. But your standard New York

coming of age story, this isn't. Marrying multiple strands, including excerpts from our heroine's

would-be novel, diary entries discovered years later

...