‘Right now, if anything, I’m a New Yorker,” Joseph O’Neill says, choosing his words carefully. He is mulling over the slippery question of his national identity. His new novel, The Dog, has been included on the Man Booker Prize longlist and, with the prize open to Americans for the first time this year, O’Neill now qualifies twice over: he was born in Cork in 1964 to an Irish father, but also holds an American passport. Yet he is reluctant to typecast himself as either an Irish or an American writer. He has a Turkish-Syrian mother, spent his early childhood in South Africa, Mozambique and Iran, went to a British school in Holland, studied at Cambridge University and worked as a barrister in London for 10 years before moving to New York. He does not feel he truly belongs anywhere.