has encountered in regard to this subject when he travels to America. Glover's Mistake Review from The New York Times: A blog called The Damp Review figures prominently in Nick Laird's new novel. On it David Pinner, once an art student, now a teacher who dabbles in cultural criticism, writes about "whatever took his fancy. Or didn't," Mr. Laird writes. "He found it easier to write on disappointments. Hatreds, easier still." At the beginning of the book David goes to an art opening for Ruth Marks, a feminist American artist who is in London on a yearlong residency. Ruth was once David's teacher, and they strike up a friendship. But Ruth strikes up more with David's much-younger roommate, James Glover, who plays the innocent to David's cynic. And, as the romance between Ruth and James develops, so does David's anger and unhappiness. Mr. Laird is also a poet, a day job he reveals in sentences like "David realized he'd been unconsciously pushing his nails into his palms, leaving little red falciform marks." The Village Voice also featured the book. Modern Gods Published in 2017. Influences and themes In a January 2006 appearance on The Leonard Lopate Show, Laird explained how travelling out of Northern Ireland for an education in Cambridge had expanded his horizons and opened him up to opportunities that he believes would have otherwise been closed to him: "I met a Jewish person for the first time. I met a black person for the first time." He also described the freedom that moving away from Northern Ireland gave him with respect to adopting a new, or broader, identity. "It does mean freedom in a way to reinvent." One of the themes in Laird's writing is the interpersonal relationships forged between men and women, and in the Lopate interview, he cited Ian McEwan and Nick Hornby as writers whom he admired for their ability to weave this element into their work. Laird is also one of the post-Troubles young novelists from Belfast, who have emerged to articulate the identity of the generation whose childhoods were experienced amid some of the region's worst violence, but who also matured in an era of problematic reconciliation. Along with Robert McLiam Wilson, whose novel Eureka Street was widely acclaimed, the most successful young novelists from Belfast are Glenn Patterson, author of six novels and a collection of essays, and Colin Bateman, a very