Belfast

John Patrick Higgins is unhappy about the state of his mouth. His teeth resemble ‘broken biscuits’, a ‘pub piano’, ‘an abandoned quarry’ and ‘Neolithic stones. It’s all I can do to keep druids from camping out on my tongue each solstice.’ So he invests in a series of expensive interventions. He has seven gnashers removed, followed by three root canals, and acquires a natty set of dentures. They feel a bit weird at first (‘it’s like having an internal beak’), but ‘I look like the actor playing me in a Hallmark movie of my life.’ In this slim, refreshingly unpretentious memoir, Higgins, a middle-aged English filmmaker living in Belfast, chronicles

Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning recent film Belfast chronicles the travails of a Protestant family amid sectarian conflict in 1969. Louise Kennedy’s much hyped first novel, set outside Belfast in 1975, explores the same tensions from a different perspective. Like her protagonist Cushla, Kennedy’s Catholic family owned a pub in a Protestant-majority town, and Trespasses captures how it feels to be outnumbered and under scrutiny. Kennedy’s career is enough to inspire anyone. A chef for 30 years, she only began writing at 47, but her ascent since is far from typical: nine publishers fought over her debut short story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac and she

Caught outside at the start of a raid in the Belfast Blitz as the incendiary bombs rain down, Audrey looks up at the sky, transfixed by its eerie beauty. She watches ‘the first magnesium flares falling, bursting into incandescent light, hanging there over the city like chandeliers’. It is the sort of thing you never forget, she thinks, ‘not in a lifetime’. This scene in These Days, by the Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell, brilliantly captures familiar territory for anyone who has read about the Blitz. The awe at the peculiar beauty, the feeling that this is unforgettable and will change people forever, the desire to domesticate these undomesticated happenings

Andrew Miller specialises in characters who are lost, often struggling to deal with the burden of failure. They don’t come much more adrift than Stephen Rose in The Slowworm’s Song, a former English soldier and alcoholic who is trying to start afresh with Maggie, a daughter he has barely met. Miller plunges straight into this painful yet beautiful novel, opening with the bombshell that drives the narrative: a letter that has arrived with the return address Belfast BT2, and a street Stephen may have walked down 30 years earlier. It is from an organisation calling itself the Commission, signed by an Ambrose Carville, inviting Stephen to come to Belfast in

‘The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun’: so begins ‘Mathematics’, one of 11 stories in this outstanding collection by the Belfast author Wendy Erskine. The opening is Erskine in miniature: the wry, unostentatious prose; the sad interiors with their charged objects (‘a small mother-of-pearl box inlaid with gold, a lipstick that was a stripe of fuchsia, a lucky charm in the shape of a dollar sign’); a character’s casual curiosity about the intimate affairs of others. A bereaved mother scours Belfast with a paint scraper, removing the ‘missing’ posters of her dead son Dance Move might also have been titled Other People’s Fun. As in Erskine’s

This memoir from Sir Richard Needham, 6th Earl of Kilmorey, businessman and former Northern Ireland minister, has a frank opening: ‘I came from a family of barely solvent aristocrats, who distrusted trade and despised politics. For some inexplicable reason, however, I had always been fascinated by both.’ Although generations of Needhams before him had ‘uneventful’ military careers, at 15 Richard decided upon an alternative plan: ‘I would first make some money, and then enter politics and change the world.’ What follows is the tale of how that scheme played out. The literary quality of political diaries can be hit and miss; but Needham is a skilled storyteller, who can deftly

Short story writers often find it irksome to be asked when the novel is coming out, as though their work was just rookie preparation for something more substantial. (That said, many do go on to write that novel.) The Dear Departed is, amazingly, the first selection of Brian Moore’s short stories to be published. Written between 1953 and 1961, they prefigure most of Moore’s 20 highly acclaimed novels, three of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. One can certainly appreciate how the stories of this collection display the concerns that would preoccupy the Belfast-born Moore throughout his career — those attempts to abandon the values and constraints of the

David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device, about a small town in Lanarkshire and its post-punk scene, showed that it wasn’t easy being Iggy Pop in Airdrie. For the Good Times, his second, set in 1970s Belfast, shows that it isn’t easy being a Perry Como-loving one of the boys in the Ardoyne. In NI parlance, Sammy McMahon and his three friends are connected. This involves participation in punishment beatings, arms raids, killings, explosions and internecine feuds. But Sammy and his friends are not paramilitaries of the type you might imagine — the guerrilla ideologue or the Donegal tweed-wearing killer. This lot, travelling around in a van decorated with

He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first in 16. And, in that time, it could be argued that Irish writers have moved away from his bare and declarative style into the wildness of, say, a Barry or a Barrett or a Baume; word-typhoons, of an affinity with the febrile and fervid times. What cannot be doubted, though, is MacLaverty’s awareness of, and wide aliveness to, the world’s flux, its writhings in the decades since his first novel Lamb; in his latest, his deep familiarity with, and angry love for, the workings of the UK, and Europe, and

Sadly, I can’t see it catching on, but one of the notable things about Jonathan Lee’s new novel is that it features a fleeting appearance by John Redwood. The late Geoffrey Howe is there too, distractedly eating fishcakes as he holds forth on the difference between humans and animals. Redwood, Howe and the rest of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet have gathered in Brighton’s Grand Hotel on the eve of the Tory conference in October 1984. In Belfast, Dan, one of the Provisional IRA’s brightest young stars, has been given the job of helping real-life bomber Patrick Magee plant the device that would kill five people — there has always been speculation

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,