Chan amháin saor ach Gaelach. The Irish proverb says “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine” – we live in each others shadows. This is an observation that we depend on each other, and should therefore be benevolent and supportive of other people. It could also mean that none of us are the autonomous individualists as idealized by modern western culture – the free thinking independent, responsible only to our individual conscience which we have each created in isolation. I was born in the north of Ireland in 1959, and was therefore 10 years old when the Troubles restarted in 1969. ‘Blood from a Shadow’ is by no means a ‘Troubles’ book, nor is it an attempt by me to rationalize or give my version of who were the heroes and who the traitors. For one thing, I don’t feel entitled to bend my characters to suit that purpose. For another, I must confess to feeling an unease, even a slight antagonism, when I read some other books that handle the subject badly, or lazily: too many lives were damaged, too many survivors still hurt, to excuse the comic book narratives that exploit their suffering and do justice to no-one. Like every other 10 year old, I learned to live a life we thought was normal, even if that normality was a heady fusion of the shadow cast by warrior-heroes, the baggage of competing cultural realities and our collective premonition that it would get worse before it would get better. Anyway, forty something years later, and it is better. Not perfect, maybe a work in progress, but better, and good enough to permit me to delve into some of those notions of free will, predetermination and the influence of our hand me down attitudes. Of course, it isn’t only the Irish who receive cultural certainties, and I hope ‘Blood from a Shadow’ creaks open the lid to shed a little doubt on the self-confirming shibboleths that turn slogans into war cries across the east/west divide.