A Meaty Dish? Yep, It’s Irish Stu

Leaving aside for the moment the impact of his windswept and rugged features on the ladies of this parish, Dishy Stuart Neville’s debut THE TWELVE is kicking up quite a lot of dust at the moment, and quite rightly too, given that it is, if I may immodestly paraphrase from the review in last weekend’s Sunday Indo (see post below), “a superb thriller, and one of the first great post-Troubles novels to emerge from Northern Ireland.”
  Anyway, Stuart is being interviewed all over the place right now. To wit:
  Stuart tells The Observer’s Henry McDonald that, “I see this book primarily as a thriller with a paranormal element to it and one that explores the themes of Northern Ireland’s recent past.”
  My own fave, though, is Stuart’s response to the Book Depository’s Mark Thwaite when Mark asks, at the end of the interview, if there’s anything else Stuart would like to add. Quoth Stuart: “Keep buying books! The world economy is in a bad way, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the really valuable things. Books, whether highbrow or lowbrow, whether on paper or on an e-reader, are what made everything we have today possible.”
  Amen, brother …