Breakfast in a hotel, a stroll through town, take in a visitor attraction or two, then it's off to a sales conference, followed by dinner and bed ...what could be more routine in the life of a travelling businessman? But this is no ordinary city. This is Hiroshima. The businessman has a murky past. And who is the mysterious Ike, a fellow traveller from Belfast, who just happens to be in Japan to give a reading from his new book at the university on the edge of town? Played out in a city where frantic consumerism exists alongside the dark eternal shadow of the bomb, "The Third Party" is a knowing and powerful exploration of death, guilt and the legacies of war. This is a mesmerising and dreamlike novel, bristling with taut psychological energy, a surreal journey where old and new, and east and west collide - a journey to the bitter end; an end that has already begun.