A clash of creeds

This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better for this to happen than in Northern Ireland? At the Day’s End pub ‘two eejits in Halloween masks’ enter the bar; ‘Trick or treat,’ they shout. ‘Fut-fut-fut-fut went the gun.’ A woman screams, ‘then a very fast piece of metal entered the side of her head and she stopped’.

Throughout the first half of the book, the horror of the pub massacre alternates with the narration of an ordinary family’s home life. The blood-curdling incident impinges drastically on the lives of the family’s two daughters: Alison, who lives with her parents and is bringing up children from her failed marriage; and Liz, a successful academic in America, on her way to make a TV film about a new religion that has emerged in an island off Papua New Guinea called New Ulster.