His debut was promising, but so are many debuts. The changes to Murray’s career have been just as dramatic. The country has done a complete 180 0 turn in 10 years. Things have, and still are, changing so quickly. “Without wanting to be a state-of-the-nation writer, I can’t help but be interested in the times we are living through. “It was all over and everyone was feeling embarrassed about what they had done the night before,” he laughs. His new novel, The Mark and the Void, published this month, is very much a product of the post-crash world.

He finished it in 2009, a year after the Lehman Brothers collapse called an abrupt halt to the good times.

“Living through that time was like being in one of those 1930s movies that opens with a million dollars being washed up on a beach, and in the next shot you see all the locals sitting round smoking cigars.” Murray embarked on Skippy Dies – his wide-ranging, tragi-comic, Dublin boarding school epic that takes in war, poetry, higher maths and much else – in 2002, when the boom had taken apparently permanent hold. “It has a lot of stuff about how Dublin was being physically transformed with cranes everywhere,” he recalls. Murray’s debut, the Whitbread first novel prize shortlisted An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was set and written around 2001. Economic, cultural and personal turbulence have been explicitly explored in, or implicitly provided a backdrop to, work by Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Colm McCann and many other writers, not least Paul Murray, the 40-year-old Dubliner whose second novel Skippy Dies was a breakout success in 2010, and whose three books together span the years before, during and after the crash. T he Celtic Tiger boom and bust has cast such a shadow over Irish life since the late 1990s that it is no surprise its effects have featured so prominently in Irish fiction.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray