John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men and then his dog ate it. I love Of Mice and Men. It’s my favourite book, and I love that a dog ate it. I wish I had more details about the dog to tell you. He was not John Steinbeck’s famous poodle, Charley, who there is a wealth of information about. All I can find out of this book-scarfing hound is that he was a setter and his name was Toby. For me, personally, his literary contribution blows anything Charley ever did out of the water. I would bet my life that Toby was over eleven months, but under one-and-a-half years old. I can suppose this with such certainty because younger puppies are too unreliable to leave alone with manuscripts, and John Steinbeck, as an avid dog-haver his whole life, would have known this. The dog would’ve been old enough that it...

Mark O’Connell’s latest book, A Thread of Violence, is about Malcolm Macarthur, who, in 1982, murdered a nurse, Bridie Gargan, and a farmer, Dónal Dunne. Macarthur was from an aristocratic background, but at the time of the murders he was on the brink of bankruptcy and risked losing his leisured lifestyle. His actions were part of a flawed plan to rob a bank, characterised by what O’Connell has called ‘the peculiar foolishness of the intellectual’, and Macarthur was eventually arrested at the home of Ireland’s attorney general, Patrick Connolly, a friend of Macarthur’s, who had no idea he was hiding a fugitive. The resulting political scandal almost brought down Charles Haughey’s government. The unlikely events were famously summarised by the acronym GUBU: grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. Macarthur served thirty years in prison for the murders. O’Connell is strangely haunted by Macarthur’s crimes, and a series of encounters and interviews...

  I ignored them for months, but the paranormal investigators insisted on my attention. It was not entirely unflattering. First came the emails I dismissed as spam, then a slew of bizarrely worded DMs which appeared among sex-bots in Instagram’s ominous ‘message requests’ folder. Finally, on a rainy afternoon in January, I received a call from an unknown number. At the other end of the line was a man who introduced himself as Patrick, ‘a supernatural specialist’. He was, he assured me, a consummate professional – my privacy would be respected, my personal safety paramount. I was about to hang up, but lately the suspicion that nothing strange or extraordinary would ever befall my life again had grown stronger, and the possibility that I might continue living bereft of more unorthodox experiences filled me with great distress. Days were passing with nothing new in them. I sighed, I listened. Patrick...

Um, so, it’s strange, isn’t it? Yes, it is, in a good way. I first became aware of my double when I was shortlisted for a major literary prize, only to find that she had won it two years earlier, making my own effort look like a funny mistake. Within this context, I simply looked exactly like her, only spelled slightly differently, misspelt even. have you seen this?? was the most common text I received in the days following the shortlist announcement, coupled with a link to some page with her photo and her achievements and her name, is this you?? In the weeks following this uncanny coincidence, I uncovered more: as well as having very nearly the exact same name, my doppelgänger and I had both moved to the UK from former colonies (she, Canada; me, Australia); were both ‘nature writers’, in the wider sense of the word; both...