Glam rock revolutionaries: other teenagers got into bisexuality or Lou Reed or heroin. Rory and Liam got into the Provos. This is their story.

Extract from The Times:

Joe Ambrose, author of Too Much Too Soon, is also unusual in the current crop of writers in allowing a sense of the changing political and economic context to filter through his work. Ambrose's training as a historian is no doubt a factor, but his decision to tangle with politics is definitely a conscious one.

"A serious writer has a duty to look into the heart of the community around him," says Ambrose. "Popular writers have a different job, it is pure entertainment, but if you go back to the various generations of great Irish writers — Yeats, Joyce and O'Casey, even O'Flaherty and O'Faoláin — they were all profoundly political."

Like McCann, Ambrose takes a naive viewpoint as the starting point for his novel; two Seventies teenage glam rock fans are seduced by the potential of the IRA as a means of rebelling against the values of their wealthy conservative parents. As they grow older, their political loyalties shift and the two grow apart. We catch up with their story around the time of Bobby Sands' death by hunger strike, and again in the present day. Ambrose's first novel Serious Time was about an Irish band trying to make it in London, and in both novels, music is a driving force. In Too Much Too Soon it is music, not politics, that carries one of the young men out of Ireland and keeps him abroad.