First novels: When romance develops from an old photograph

The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and mother of four, finds herself remembering an old love affair. Michèle Forbes achieves a vivid depiction of family life — the daily squabbles and teasing, the nuances of Katherine’s love for her children through a haze of exhaustion, one daughter’s struggle to be liked by bullying friends and another’s blushingly awkward first crush. Interwoven with these domestic scenes are chapters set 20 years earlier, in which we see the unfurling of Katherine’s haunting romance.

The novel is in part a meditation on differing forms of love, comparing this all-consuming passion, cut unhappily short, to Katherine’s ‘love lived, not imagined’ for her husband, with its ‘sweet pattern of compromise’. Alongside are the startling changes happening in the city: what was an optimistic place with a close-knit community and amateur dramatics is fast becoming a battleground.