Uh, tell me about her, because she predates the era in which we find ourselves in the novel.

She does.

She's a 16th century noblewoman, and she was executed in 1599, a public beheading.

Uh, um, which reminds me of what we were talking earlier about the public executions in America.

Um, but Beatrice, she was executed for be- A conspiracy to have her father, Count Cenci, assassinated.

He was.

He was bludgeoned to death and s- um, stabbed and thrown out of a window, and they couldn't make it look like an accident, although they tried.

Uh, how did you seize upon it, by the way?

Is it the government's job to actually do that?

Well, this would appear to be a weak government, though, backing down in the face of protests as it did with the fuel protesters.

And it's clear that it's been a learning tool for the current government.

dispute because the government gave in to fewer protesters.

I'm not saying they shouldn't have.

You know, people are suffering.

What I'm saying is that there are consequences to the stoppage in terms of hospital workers.

Michael D., back on the front page at least of the Mail on Sunday.

Amazing.

Wasn't quite 18 when she started writing it.

And I became very interested in what had been going on in her life to give rise to a book which is about many things, but among them scientific overreach, What happens when family life goes disastrously wrong? What happens when the creator rejects his creation and then the creation is full of rage? questions of nature or nurture there was so much going on and and yet always I was thinking she was 20 she was 20.

So I started researching her life and initially I'd intended it for Glorious Monsters to be very much a novel about Mary Shelley but the Shelley circle as you read in the blurb were intriguing.

Percy Shelley, her husband, remembered today as a fae ethereal lyric poet.

He's known for Ode to the West Winged or Ode to a Skylark, Hail to the Eblide Spirit.

But he was a radical, the most radical of poets.

There's a sense that you were trying, were you trying to sort of rescue her from that under the shadow of Percy and kind of out of just, we know her for Frankenstein, but she was a lot more and she has a lot going on.

Martina Devon.

This is a legacy issue frozen in time since 1998.

And it's a reminder that bullets and bombs were taken out of Northern Ireland as a result of the peace process, thankfully, but a lot of bitterness and division remains.

And it's a dreadful shame that in the last 28 years, more work wasn't done on community relations.

I did note that the Parades Commission said there had been some progress, but clearly too little.

And what's notable about this peculiar, to put it mildly, decision by the Parades Commission to allow the march... after 28 years of saying no for good reason, what's notable about it is that there doesn't seem to have been dialogue with the local community and surely that is a key part of reconciliation and attempts to build community relations.

The community weren't asked whether they were willing to have this march and clearly they weren't and it has been and the one ray of hope I see is international mediation.

Martina Devon, what's your take on that?

not the more important thing in some respects? I know the institutions are very important and proper governance, democratically elected, but is there not the bigger problem what this reveals about the divisions in Northern society and that despite the fact that we've had peace since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, on the most part, that those sort of sectarian divides have not been overcome?

Well, you know, cracks were papered over.

I think the biggest problem is the lack of integrated education.

And the Catholic Church has to bear a lot of the responsibility for blocking and for not cooperating when attempts were made made to remove these divides in schooling between people because how else are Catholic kids and Protestant kids really going to grow up treating each other as neighbors if they're somehow othered? But I think this does reveal that society isn't functioning as it should.

Definitely.

And there should be more work towards integrated schooling.

I have a friend who told me that his 19-year-old son, so born long after the Good Friday Agreement, doesn't really, thankfully, know what it was like.

Okay, Martina Devlin, why is it that there seems to be such an emphasis in the North on things like parades and ceremonies to commemorate history? That we have the Orange Order wanting to have, you know, they say in the name of tradition, so many events involving these parades which are regarded as offensive by nationalists and why on the other hand do we have so many events by nationalists commemorating their dead and hunger strikers and the like why is it that these things are so important about celebrating and commemorating the past rather than looking to the present and the future

Yeah.

So when I was first writing novels, I looked into my own family and I discovered that my grandmother had an uncle who eloped on the Titanic, Tom O'Brien.

She was Josie O'Brien from County Limerick.

And she used to say, poor Uncle Tom.

I didn't know much about it, but when I had a rummage around in the record, I discovered that he eloped with a strong farmer's daughter, which was why it had to be an elopement.

There was class difference.

He worked in a creamery and came from a more modest background.

which going back to that ghost stuff, that made a huge impact, didn't you? Yeah.

Tell me about Martina, your first memories of going to a library.

My father broke me.

He was a bus driver.

He worked shifts.

And one day he came home from work early.

And I'm from quite a big family.

I'm one of seven.

Do you think that you wouldn't have become as avid a reader as you did, Martina, if you hadn't have ended up in a library as young as you did?