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All the Beggars Riding

This novel is about a plastic surgeon from Belfast who leads a double life: a wife and two children in Belfast, a mistress and two children in London. A huge – and fascinating – part of the research was tracking down and interviewing people who had experienced (or even perpetrated) this level of deception.

The novel entailed meticulous research on several other counts. It takes the form of a memoir: at the start of it the narrator, Lara Moorhouse, states her intention to tell the story of her parents and her unusual life. There was therefore a lot of painstaking research necessary to make the memoir plausible – checking the weather, for example, on certain key dates in the 1970s and the newspaper headlines on specific days – because the reader would have even less tolerance for erroneous detail than in a novel that did not pretend to be anything other than outright fiction.

I also did a lot of reading around the subject of memoir and fiction, trying to understand what the subtle differences (in tone, style, etc.) might be between creative non-fiction and straight fiction and working out how I could incorporate those tones into Lara’s voice and narrative.

A further element of research was into the Northern Irish novel and specifically into how Belfast has been portrayed in fiction throughout the city’s history. The final third of the novel was my attempt to create a present-day portrait of the city and I put a considerable amount of time and effort into reading other Belfast-set works.

The novel was published by Faber in Spring 2013. It was serialised for broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’. It was Belfast’s and Derry/Londonderry’s ‘One City One Book’ choice for May 2013 and was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.