‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another’, Helena says to Steve in A LOADED GUN, quoting from poetry she teaches. Nothing Steve wants more, if only the world will let him strive for it. From very different backgrounds they work in a university, Steve as director of the sports centre. He’d wanted to be a professional footballer, but became a soldier in Northern Ireland and the Falklands, sharing in killings whose shadows now hang over him. Maybe life always comes with a threat, ‘a loaded gun’, as in another poem Helena tells Steve about. As a woman of ideas she knows about all such things. Privileged herself, she wants the world to be a fairer place for women, and for all who are oppressed and disadvantaged. But in the 1980s, Britain is torn by conflict, as its first woman prime minister determines to re-shape the nation in her own image, which is closer to Steve’s than to Helena’s. More than one gun is fired in this love story and political thriller.