The Third Party [Paperback]

'One of Ireland's most prominent contemporary novelists.' Independent on Sunday 'Glenn Patterson should be writer-in-residence at Stormont' Joseph O'Connor, Guardian 'Over the past decade, Patterson has built up a body of work with a real weight to it.Truth be told, his last couple of novels have shown some fancy footwork.' Herald 'If in the coming months I read a handful of new books better than Number 5 then it will have been a very good year indeed for literary fiction.' The Times 'This is an author whose vigour and flair keep us reading avidly as he exercises his capacity to make the everyday engrossing. Independent

Breakfast in a hotel, a stroll through town, take in a visitor attraction or two, then it's off to a sales conference, followed by dinner and bed ...what could be more routine in the life of a travelling businessman? But this is no ordinary city. This is Hiroshima. The businessman has a murky past. And who is the mysterious Ike, a fellow traveller from Belfast, who just happens to be in Japan to give a reading from his new book at the university on the edge of town? Played out in a city where frantic consumerism exists alongside the dark eternal shadow of the bomb, "The Third Party" is a knowing and powerful exploration of death, guilt and the legacies of war. This is a mesmerising and dreamlike novel, bristling with taut psychological energy, a surreal journey where old and new, and east and west collide - a journey to the bitter end; an end that has already begun.

GLENN PATTERSON was born in Belfast in 1961. He is the author of six novels, including Burning Your Own (1988) which won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and Fat Lad (1992) which was shortlisted for the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award. Lapsed Protestant, a collection of his journalistic pieces, was published in 2006 to great acclaim. He has been a Writer in Residence at the universities of East Anglia and Cork, and at Queen's University Belfast, and is now a Creative Writing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's.