The third novel from award-winning arts broadcaster John Kelly is set in Dublin in the not-so-distant future. Not quite a dystopia, it’s a dark, dangerous and polluted shithole nonetheless, subject to frequent power and water shortages, and overrun by spies, touts and other paranoid subversive types.

Aided by technology, hawk-eyed octogenarian Monk is keeping assorted neighbours under strict surveillance – amongst them Schroeder, a failed novelist recently sacked from Trinity, now stalking a glamorous TV reporter in the days leading up to the state visit of the American President. When the President is assassinated, Monk sets about discovering Schroeder’s unlikely connection to his death.

Kelly’s prose throughout is poetic, but the book is also smart, funny, cynical and ultimately thought-provoking.