Meet Cushla Lavery, an occasional Catholic and 24-year-old schoolteacher who moonlights as a bartender in her family’s pub. The fog of war, even a guerrilla war, is still a fog. Louise Kennedy recreates the Troubles in her restrained, absorbing debut, Trespasses, set in Belfast in the mid-1970s. The past leaves its thumbprints on us all, and on none more than an emerging generation of dazzling literary talent. Artists across mediums have tapped that dark era as well, evidenced by the suspense-laden television series Bloodlands. Colum McCann’s sublime novel TransAtlantic stole its plot, in part, from real-world headlines, including George Mitchell’s Herculean efforts to secure a truce among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland in 1998, known as the Good Friday Agreement, the terminus of the Troubles, the decades-long conflict that pitted families and neighbors against each other.
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