After the publication of Joy , Lee won a Society of Authors K Blundell Trust Award and was long listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award . High Dive , Lee 's third novel , was published in the UK in 2015 and re-imagined events surrounding the Brighton hotel bombing by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1984 , an attempt to assassinate then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher '' The Sunday Times '' called it " an extraordinary performance : vividly written , painfully human and fully fleshing the inner lives of its characters " . '' The Guardian '' , after publishing a review by Jake Arnott , named it among their " books of the year " and stated that it was " a multi-voiced epic that leads towards a stunning finale . " '' The Independent '' , in its review , called Lee " a wordsmith of incomparable eloquence " and also chose it as one of their books of the year . Not all critics were as positive . A negative review of the novel was published in '' The Financial Times '' , which argued that " the novel suffers from some bum notes ... the thoughts of the characters meander in ways that are n't always interesting or revealing . " In an interview with Mariella Frostrup for the BBC , Lee defended his decision to tell the story of the real-life bombing through largely fictional characters
Brighton hotel bombing
Brighton hotel bombing
Jonathan Lee (novelist)