Two Souls

"Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there." --Faust / Goethe Set against the soundtrack of David Bowie's first Berlin album "Low," Two Souls is an explosive novel that moves deftly between three time-frames: Belfast, August 1978 and the doomed love affair between a young punk and an older, bohemian art student; April 1979, specifically a frenzied Irish Cup Final day, the young punk now transformed into a violent football hooligan; and, through a series of smuggled "prison comms," the dark, paramilitary-stalked Belfast streets of 1987, that young punk now an INLA leader embarking on the assassination of former comrades in a bitter feud, where all threads collide in a tense, thrilling denouement. A seething cast of football hooligans, anarchic punks, paramilitary killers, disillusioned socialists and a young couple in a love affair that leaves a bitter, lethal legacy--all played out against a fizzing backdrop of sex, drugs, punk and avant-garde, punishment shootings, clerical child sex abuse, the advent of video porn and the end of communism. At turns shocking and heart-breaking, with razor-sharp language and a turbo-charged plot, Two Souls is a singular "Troubles" novel like no other, tragically exposing human nature's futile efforts to make the right decisions and to choose a life worth living. Think Martin Amis meets Irving Welsh against a febrile and gritty sectarian backdrop.