A PLACE OF SAFETY: NEW WORLD FOR OLD

In Sullivan’s historical thriller, a young man from Northern Ireland emerges from a catatonic state in Texas and finds that he’s an international fugitive.

In 1973,17-year-old Brendan Kinsella suddenly regains consciousness at his Aunt Mari’s house in Houston, Texas, far from his own home in Derry, Northern Ireland. His mother’s sister cautiously begins to reveal to him the shocking nature of his predicament. After he participated in a politically motivated bombing—he’s involved in the underground resistance against British rule—he was smuggled out of the country under an assumed name: Brendan McGabbhinn. Badly wounded, he slid into akinetic catatonia—a state in which his “mind had separated itself from this world, for a little while.” Now he struggles to remember details of his former life; he also resists doing so, however, mainly because his beloved girlfriend, Joanna, perished in the attack. At first, he’s elated to be free of “the horrors of Derry, and the hate and the pain and the anger and the suffering and the never-ending brutality, both small and large,” but he considers returning to his homeland after he finds out that his brother, Eamonn, has been arrested and that his mother is ill with cancer. Over the course of the novel, Sullivan deftly manages to present the protagonist as an ordinary teenager with prosaic, adolescent longings and shows how he’s been transformed by living in a grimly violent environment. The entire novel is written from Brendan’s first-person perspective, a narrative choice that allows readers to easily feel his emotional conflicts and agitations. The novel can be bewilderingly unclear at times, but such confusion artfully mirrors the protagonist’s own disorientation. Overall, it’s a subtly evocative tale with psychological nuance and historical verisimilitude.

A moving depiction of the human costs of political chaos.