https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/07/inventory-darran-anderson-review

A troubled Northern Ireland upbringing is sensitively recounted in objects – floppy disk, cassette, toy soldier

Belfast and Derry, Northern Ireland’s largest cities, are separated by the Glenshane Pass, a mountain road devoid of human habitation other than the self-described highest pub in Ireland. But for Darran Anderson, life growing up in a working-class Catholic area of Derry in the early 1980s was not very different from the childhood I experienced in a working class Protestant area of Belfast a few years earlier. True, the graffiti he saw – IRA, INLA – invoked different saviours from the graffiti I saw – UVF, UDA – but both sets of artists were equally committed to the uncovering of “touts” (police informers).

For Anderson, a writer on architecture whose last book Imaginary Cities was a compendium of real and invented urban space, Derry felt isolating, and his fascination with the “impossibly enigmatic” names of east European football teams and the territories of the shipping forecast meant the flatness of Fivemiletown and Strabane wouldn’t hold him long.