Degrees of Provocation

About the Book

A very black comedy

St Patrick once had to rid Liam´s homeland of snakes. But the young lad´s granddad catches him playing with one. In front of his sister´s full-length mirror. Wearing her Sunday frock. And so, it becomes a foregone conclusion that Liam and his friend will someday have to go away. Forever. Because that was how it worked in Ireland of the ´fifties.

Nonetheless, once on the loose and making the best of a lonely situation, he arrives in Berlin in the mid-´sixties. That´s when he hooks up with a mad band of Drag Queens headed by Dachau Dolly and helps spark the pink revolution of 1968. In the West. But his real passion lies in frolicking through obscure pastures of the communist East.

Find out what the long-term aftermath of one such outing is, when, following his raucously drunken, madly camp, rendition of a popular torch song on the stairs of the underground station at Friedrichstraße, the patrolling soldiers round him up and deliver him to their commander.

That´s in Degrees of Provocation, a novel of anger.