The Life Business

With astonishing power, award-winning author John Grant portrays the human facility to falsify history, using as his backdrop the beginnings of the late-20th-century troubles in Northern Ireland, as an unwitting mainland schoolboy finds himself caught up in a violence he barely understands.

In the closing story, “The Life Business”, the fantasy master who writes as John Grant draws upon his . . . real-life teenage stint as a British cadet. He integrates disturbing and emotional reveries into his shape-shifting characters. His story rattled me the most [in the anthology Requiems for the Departed]. Grant eerily channels otherworldly senses into a psychological study of identity.

--John L. Murphy, PopMatters

[In "The Life Business"] memoir meets memory, the childhood crimes whose hammer blows and sharp chisels shape our adult lives. Grant's account of a summer camp on the banks of the Foyle, pre-Troubles, shines a beam far brighter than any Rupert Bear flashlight could cast. [The anthology] closes with a fantastic twist.

--Critical Mick

...a compelling coming-of-age tale.

--Declan Burke, Crime Always Pays