You get a sense of the tone of Séamas O’Reilly’s debut novel before the action even begins. ‘To remember everything is a form of madness … confusion is not an ignoble condition,’ reads the first epigraph, taken from Brian Friel’s play Translations. On the next page is a second epigraph: the transcription of a piece of graffiti that, we are told, appeared at a bus depot in Derry in 2003. ‘REMEMBER BARRY SANDS’, it reads, in what we can only assume is a muddled attempt to honour the most famous martyr in 20th-century Irish history.

Prestige Drama is not a trivial novel but its central theme – the Troubles and the shadow they continue to cast over Derry – is consistently mined for comedy. O’Reilly is a columnist for the Irish Times, features editor of the literary-­satirical magazine The Fence and the author of a memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? (2021), which recounts his upbringing as one of eleven siblings in Derry and the death of his mother from cancer when he was five. All of the gallows humour of that memoir is on show here in this slim but impressive tale.

The set-up is simple: a fictional US streaming platform has acquired a TV drama about the Troubles called Dead City. A glamorous American star, Monica Logue, has been cast as the lead in the hope that she would ‘do for Troubles-era Derry what she’d already done for shops that sold