This PhD submission consists of: (i) a novel, What We Leave Behind (WWLB); and (ii) a critical commentary. (i). What We Leave Behind relates two months in the life of Rowan O’Reilly in 2009, and has four settings: the fictional town of Darden, London, Paris and a retirement community in the Campsies. After being told by her father that her dead mother is alive, Rowan leaves Darden to search for her mother, Marianne, who disappeared in 1978. In 2004 I discovered a website seeking information on Shelagh McDonald, a Scottish folk singer who released two albums in the Seventies before she disappeared. In 2003 both albums were re-released; however, Shelagh’s disappearance remained a mystery. From this beginning, I imagined what would happen if Shelagh had had a child who believed her mother was dead. While mother and daughter relations are crucial to the work, WWLB also engages with the legacy of cultural, social and political change of the 1960s and 1970s while investigating how identity is shaped by decline and development in the urban landscape. As well as considering the subjective and selective nature of memory and the role of music in society, the novel examines the plurality of the Scottish working class experience and life in housing estates in Glasgow and Paris. (ii). The critical commentary discusses the novel’s structure and narrative strategies, as well as its themes of marginalia, marginality, motherhood and music in the text. It examines the ways in which WWLB responds to the Scottish literary tradition, specifically its relation to what Clandfield and Lloyd name ‘redevelopment fiction’ (2007, p.124). Thus, the commentary also considers the role of class, language and the use of the vernacular in WWLB. It concludes with an account of the difficulties of transforming researched information into art.

Regards from the Angel enacts issues of loss, event, and representation. It interrogates ideas of what the psychotherapist John Bowlby calls a "secure base." The novel acts out events, as theorised by Badiou, Deleuze, and Lyotard. It dramatises the effects of the death of a parent, of abuse; and of the loneliness of spiritual "lostness," via Derrida's analysis of Freud's idea of melancholy and mourning. In the novel "lostness" produces certain symptoms: addiction, promiscuity, and even psychosis. The novel takes a classic format: five acts. In each act a new factor is introduced. In the first, the protagonist moves to London and meets the antagonist. In the second he experiences the realities of living in the city. In the third, he meets a woman called Megan, with whom he falls in love. In the fourth, he suffers a loss of unity and becomes divided from himself. In the fifth, he lives with and then leaves Megan; and the antagonist dies; the protagonist suffers a breakdown. The novel is high! y intertextual. Because of the nature of the characters, especially Megan, there are many references to other texts. The very short thesis that follows investigates some of the issues raised in Regards from the Angel. Bowlby's idea of "the secure base," Derrida's refutation of the classic Freudian model of mourning, and Badiou' s theory of the event all are discussed. Ultimately though, Regards from the Angel is a novel about loss, event, and love

In 1666, poet and revolutionary John Milton completes his epic Paradise Lost amid a/ever of prophetic speculation: is this the year God will finally deliver a terrible judgement on London? in 1777 an apprentice engraver called William Bloke has a defining spiritual experience; thirteen years later this vision returns, and leads him towards a daring act of creation. In J888, five women are brutally murdered and mutilated in the East End by a troubled young man in thrall to a mysterious master. And in 1999, as the walls between past, present and future collapse, and the end of time itself approaches, a computer programmer working on the Millennium Bug discovers he might hold the key to the coming apocalypse. This Creative Writing PhD comprises a complete novel (86,495 words) and a critical commentary (32,269 words), plus appendices (c. 10,000 words). The Countenance Divine is an original work of prose fiction composed of four parallel narratives, each grounded in extensive historical and literary research. The accompanying commentary takes the form of a series of critical reflections which investigate and contextualise the process of composition. In particular, they provide new perspectives on the ethics of using and abusing historical facts in imaginative writing, and on the place of the fantastical in contemporary British literary fiction. They also consider the specific formal and stylistic challenges of this project, and offer a uniquely frank and detailed account of the creation of a novel from first inspiration to final draft. The appendices include extracts from early drafts, as well as the first modern transcript of one of the novel's key historical sources: a rare pamphlet which describes the disinterment of John Milton's remains in 1790.

A House With No Angels is a novel that is narrated by three women: Ade, Elizabeth and Kutes. Following the death of Peter they arrange to travel to Nigeria to bury him. However, his death has sparked an array of emotions that each woman works through, culminating in revelations that shake them. Set against a political backdrop from the 5th Pan African Conference in 1945, to the black power movement and current day asylum, each of the women maps out her own story. This thesis offers an insight into the ways in which research influenced creation of the novel, A House U7ith No Angels, and charts the changes in direction as the creative process continued through drafting. The Introduction gives an overview of the novel and the process of decision making involved. Chapter One examines the research element of the novel, including a brief exploration of the politics of West Africa in the post-World War II years, the British working class movement and Black British Feminism in the '70s and '80s. Chapter Two engages with the points of view of the narrative and the historical perspectives of the novel. Chapter Three explores how I developed the language for each of the characters and what this portrays. Chapter Four considers space, time and memory within the novel, integrating personal memory as a focus for developing the story. The Conclusion looks at the novel as practice-based research and explores the question of authenticity.

This thesis consists of my novel and reflections on how it works, presented as an 80/20 split. The Perfectly Happy Castrato imagines the life and times of the last singer on earth to be dismembered in the name of beauty. How can Raffi Peach, an anomaly in the Roaring Twenties, discover meaning in a world that shuns him, and with whom will he find it? The companion piece is "The Negative Mirror: Claircognoscence and Reader Sympathy." It ponders why we, as readers, might be drawn into this figure's situation on the deepest levels of self-interrogation. Together, they are a response to my belief that cultural castration, or the sense of being marooned by society, is a trait readers unconsciously desire in a main character with whom they identify. My exegesis will demonstrate this fascination in the canon and suggest that, post-Freud and pre-Freud, because we all feel we're missing something on an ontological level, we will voyeuristically project ourselves even unto the fortunes of a wretch who is ennobled by his or her struggle to this extreme. Next, this thesis will demonstrate that, as a gentleman from a subliminal Indiana, Raffi Peach can most artistically stand in for a contemporary reader if the story is a variation on a Menippean or Varronian satire. To the degree that Raffi Peach succeeds as a "metasemiotic vehicle" (see footnote #14) without sexual eclat-viz. "with that special nothing"-he'll have embodied Keats's notion of negative capability as a figure for the reader and explored not just the "indeterminate middle ground ... between the [polar] extremes of gender" (see footnote # 14) but the shadow land unfolding between the story and the reader himself. I will then consider the harmony between the myopic "modernity" of Raffi's xenophobic Boston and psychosexually disturbing events in the 21st century and reflect on how these intentional resonances deepen my project. Further, I will isolate elements of the dynamic sublime that are so palpable in Raffi's cognitive universe that buildings crowd their sails and rush toward him. In this sense, setting is character. iii Finally, we will slip inside the negative mirror, enter the text, account for the "rosy sadism" (see footnote #30) of a reader's intruding upon a character's private thoughts (as Althusser writes, "no reader is innocent"- see footnote #31), and consider how Raffi's gift for seeing "into the present" can best be revealed with a third-person claircognoscent point of view. Considering the mystical implications of his referred omniscience, he verges on being the reader himself.

This PhD submission consists of my new novel, The Lost Act of the Terrorist (80,000 words), and a reflective thesis (20,000 words) which analyses both the production of this novel and my journey as a writer up to this point. I have divided the reflective component into three sections which trace the personal experiences, political events and literary sources that have influenced my development as a writer vis-a-vis my three novels. The first section looks, in particular, at the racism experienced by the children of the immigrants who came to Britain in the years following World War II and recounts the writing and reception of my first novel, Hond on the Sun (Penguin, 1983). In the second section, I trace the broader social, political and literary influences that impacted upon my development as a writer, in particular, progressive literature and Sufi poetry, and show its influences on my second novel, Wlllle There is Ltght(Comma, 2003). In the final section, I show how the reflective process involved in studying for this PhD helped to shape the creative component, and also provide a commentary on the succession of wars from 1940 to the present whose cumulative horror leave their mark on the main protagonist of the latest novel, Saleem Khan. Saleem Khan moves to the UK after the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, returns home during the short war of 1971 (that, in turn, led to the creation of Bangladesh), returns home again during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ((1979-1989), before becoming inextricably caught up in the post-9111 'war on terror'.

This thesis comprises two parts: a novel, The Wild Girl, and a complementary discourse. The Wild Girl is largely set in France and interweaves three timescales, 1731, 1968 and 1998. In 1968, a pair of young curators tries to breathe life into what they fear might be a dusty exhibition celebrating the life of a feral child found in the local woods over 200 years earlier. Kicking against their fusty boss and carried away by the spirit of May 1968, they bend, then break rules until ultimately they commit murder. In 1998, as France settles down to watch the World Cup, a private detective is immolated in an arson attack. When Detective Bousquet investigates, it appears that the fire links back to both the folie a deux of 1968 and a bizarre, ruthless religious cult. The complementary discourse is divided into four sections and examines the research, poetics and authorial decisions that went into the composition of the novel. The first chapter examines the historical and factual research needed for a novel set in other times and another country. Chapter 2 is an examination of craft and deals with the creative processes involved in novel writing. Chapter 3 considers the challenges of structuring a three-strand story, the difficulties of creating narrative tension therein - and the demands on the reader that using intertwining narratives makes. As the original work was never planned to be detective fiction, chapter 4 discusses the extent to which the completed novel conforms to that genre and the difficulties faced in avoiding the tropes of the genre.