Jonathan Lee likes to build his fiction around catastrophe. His second novel, Joy, told the story of Joy Stephens, a brilliant young lawyer who falls forty feet on to a marble floor while at work in an office in London’s Square Mile, transforming the lives of those closest to her. His most recent, High Dive, chronicles the lives of three characters in the six years preceding the IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party conference in September 1984.

Dan is a young man from Belfast who is undistinguished academically but is ‘good at some things, small things’, and has ‘a talent for remembering’. Much of his remembering is focused on the Troubles, on the death of his father and two of his brother’s friends, and when we encounter