A State of Mind Book

"At the height of the Troubles in the mid-1970s, John Hughes, journalist and aspiring novelist, has lost his way. Comfortably settled in rural Wicklow, with his wife Laura away in Dublin and teenage daughter Rachel at boarding school, his days haze into aimless meanderings and afternoons in the local pub." "When once-feted English author Bill Cromer and Ingrid, his German girlfriend, move into the Old Rectory to enjoy Ireland's tax advantages, John awakens from his torpor to find himself caught up in a vortex of marital betrayal, suicide, nationalist resentment and blackmail." Aware of of his tenuous hold on sanity, and faced with the destruction of all that he cherishes, John is forced to redeem himself as a writer.