John James O'Loughlin is a north-London-based Irish author who was born in Galway, the Republic of Ireland, to an English-born mother of Irish descent and an Irish father and, having been removed from his homeland at the tender age of 2½ by the maternal side of his family, including his grandmother, who were unable to remain in Galway, grew up first in Hampshire and then in Surrey, in south-eastern England, where he attended a variety of state schools. Most of his adult life has been spent at different addresses in the London Borough of Haringey, north of the River Thames, to which he moved – rather reluctantly – from Surrey in 1974, and all but a few of his books have been written there, the majority of which, like this one, are of an intensely philosophical not to say metaphysical and even religious character.