Few debut Irish novels have been more widely celebrated, and with good reason. Yet Deane's powerful, episodic excursion into a Derry childhood dogged by external political tensions and a dark, unspoken family history, is at heart a painful ghost story written from the gut. The book is terse and elegiac, with a lyrical style. Deane's narrator is reckless and yet cautious, even cunning at times, in his need to unravel the past which he approaches with the edgy daring of one peeling a plaster off a wound. The tone of loving intensity in which he observes his beloved father and, in particular, his silent, suffering mother is that of a witness neutralised by grief. This is an uneven book - lighter moments seem included merely to deflect the weight of memory. But as testimony, as reportage, as memorial and as lament, it is unforgettable.
