AN obese, homebound alcoholic dies alone in his squalid home. Following reports of an abandoned house, police find him and begin the sterile science of cataloguing his death, and life.

As the body journeys through official channels, the oddly omnipresent narrator (about whom more is steadily revealed) spills out the stories of the people, tethered to little but their addictions, orbiting the man whose corpse opens the proceedings.

For his third novel, Jon McGregor, who lives in Nottingham with his wife and young children, has written about people who remain hidden in plain sight. Even The Dogs tells the story of people united mainly by their addictions – to heroin, mostly.

Unflinching in its depictions of the physical and mental degradations that come with a life spent feeding an addiction, the book nonetheless portrays those lives with humour and, above all, humanity.

The idea for Even The Dogs percolated for years. Jon's wife, Alice, works with the homeless, with drug and alcohol addicts. From her, he'd picked up bits and pieces about the lives of people in those situations. From her, he heard the story of a man whose body was found in his Nottingham flat days after he'd died alone.

"One of the things that put me off writing the book for a long time was knowing how much research I'd have to do to write it properly," Jon said.

Eventually he waded into that research, a process that sent him from social workers to addicts, and even to Notts coroner Dr Nigel Chapman.

"The one thing with Jon is that he does his homework," Dr Chapman said.

"He spent a long time getting everything correct ... the thing with Jon's books is that they are so real and so true because of the homework and the research.

"The book itself is a tremendous read."

For his part, Jon was grateful that the coroner was so helpful and willing to share the inner workings of his profession. And while a great deal of research did go into Even The Dogs, he's quick to add that he's no expert.

"I did enough research to write this book, but this is a novel," Jon said. "I didn't do as much research as I would have done if this was a non-fiction book. I don't know nearly as much about this situation as people who live it, or people who work in the hostels or day centres."

But he wrote down the details, the little pieces, that give the book its power. The quick walk of somebody who's just begged and found enough money to score. The power-structure of the people hanging around an off-licence or a phone box. To read Even The Dogs is to see the lives and hear the voices of people whom most others, caring and well-meaning or not, can usually look past.

Much of that comes from the book's language – swiftly flowing, addled yet self-aware and heavy with the lingo and jargon of a desperate sub-culture.

Getting the basic terms right – asking about "having a dig" and "keeping the rattles off" – was a way for Jon to open doors during research.

"The vocabulary – that was quite deliberate," Jon said.

Asking basic questions offers immediate entrance into somebody's world. So he'd ask addicts for the dictionary definitions of their lives. What do you call the effect that you get? What do you call it when you withdraw?

Jon depicts systems and a society that often fail people like this, even as they fail themselves. He does not, however, view his writing as political.

"For me the act of describing this world properly and authentically is in itself quite political," he said.

"I'm always very conscious of not setting out to write something with a theme or an agenda in mind, because then you kill off the story and the characters."

But of course he found things that prodded at his social conscience.

"There were things I was discovering in the research that were surprising me or shocking me or just making me think 'This isn't really OK, this isn't really right,'" he said.

"It's not necessarily having any big conclusions of my own. You can look at the situation with heroin use, addiction and the services there to help people, the rehabilitation services, and think something's not right. But that's a long way from knowing what the solution might be."

Jon McGregor speaks at the Broadway Cinema, Broad Street, tomorrow at 6.30pm. See www.broadway.org.uk for more details. Even The Dogs is available now.

--erik.petersen@nottinghameveningpost.co.uk