Jan Carson and David Keenan both create powerful, disturbing versions of a city that is at once familiar yet completely strange. Writer and community arts facilitator Jan Carson’s spectacular new novel The Fire Starters is grittily real and wildly magical: a story of fierce familial love and sacrifice set against the backdrop of a frenzied Belfast, where the lines between fantasy and truth, right and wrong, have begun to blur. Award-winning author David Keenan’s powerful and fearless second novel For The Good Times explores the dark night of Belfast in the 1970s, when three Ardoyne boys, who have found themselves in the incongruous position of running a comic book shop taken over by the IRA, become transfixed by the possibilities of free reign criminality. In conversation with Martin Doyle, Books Editor, The Irish Times.