Second paragraph of third chapter:

Commercial aeroplanes leaving and landing at the City Airport continue to pass overhead. They’re unaware of Sammy and the shape he’s spelling out as he walks. He’s too small to be seen from the sky. He’s a grain of sand, a dot, a pin, a misplaced punctuation mark. Even God would have to squint. However, if he could be seen from such a height, if, for example, you were peering through binoculars or some other magnifying lens, your eye would be drawn to him, dragging his heels from one street to the next, kicking an empty Coke bottle as he goes. You would know that Sammy did not belong on these streets, drifting.

East Belfast, marching season, the present day (2019); two fathers concerned about their children. Ex-Loyalist Sammy suspects that his son is the masked social media influencer behind a wave of arson attacks. Trouble GP Jonathan’s daughter was begotten of a Siren who came and stayed in his bath and then disappeared back into the waves.

Most of the novel is gritty reality, so that you can almost smell the tarmac bubbling in the summer sunlight; but the parts with Jonathan and his daughter edge into magical realism with a particular Belfast idiom, where parents of strangely gifted children navigate both intrusive supernatural forces and the banal bureaucracy of health care and social security.

Often this sort of trope can feel bolted onto a conventional narrative, but Carson makes you feel that Belfast (East Belfast, very specifically) is the sort of traumatised place where reality starts to erode at the edges. It’s well-balanced, in the sense that a cyclist going at top speed over uneven terrain remains well balanced. Anyone expecting a standard urban grim novel will be surprised. You can get it here.

Bechdel fail. The book is either first-person from Jonathans point of view, or tight-third from Sammy’s, and they talk to very few women who in turn don’t talk much to each other, and if they do it’s about Jonathan or Sammy.