Turning for Home is a really interesting book, in that it takes its starting point from large, International affairs, but then distills down to an intimate look at two people dealing with huge personal issues, while trying to navigate an annual family gathering.

Robert’s story, where he has been ‘something in Government’, and thought it all behind him until a University project begins talking to former IRA personnel, was compelling because of his connection to world events. There are twists and secrets here, but it also follows him on a personal level as he deals with the death of his wife, which seems to have been sudden for him as she has successfully hidden her illness.

This is played out alongside his granddaughter Kate’s story, in which we learn that grief and a difficult family relationship has led her to being admitted to hospital. This is her first time at the annual party for three years – was it a mistake?

Barney Norris is a really interesting author as he writes quite slim volumes that pack a mighty punch. Kate’s story contains some incredibly distressing things, and yet is handled with a sensitivity that allows it to unfold in a way that helps you to completely understand her. Her complex relationship with her family will have elements that familiar to many of us – although, perhaps not quite so fraught!

There is an innate sadness in this book, but it resolves in such a joyful and hopeful way, that it makes it ultimately rewarding to read. Just excellent.

When I had to read Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain for a book group, I found myself falling in love with a new author. I absolutely loved that book, and couldn't wait to read anything else that Barney Norris wrote.

Norris has a real skill in getting under the skin of people in a way that is a true quality in writers. I was excited for this book too, and as with the first one, it's not the plot (there isn't much of one) that makes this so compelling, but the characterisation and Norris's ability to make you feel what they do.

Exceptional writing.

Every year the family descends on the 'big house' to celebrate Robert's birthday. This year both Robert and his granddaughter Kate have more cause than usual to reflect. For Robert, having recently lost his wife, actions from the past re-surface. He was involved in the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the release of the 'Boston Tapes' means that old allies are coming out of the woodwork. Meanwhile Kate has her own demons to conquer, after an accident that robbed her of her love she has suffered from anorexia and is now drifting through life working in a call centre. Both use the opportunity afforded by the party to reflect and for both there is the chance to move on.

This is a short book but rather than being sparely written, it feels detailed. This is a difficult thing to achieve and the quality of the prose is exceptional. Norris is sympathetic to Kate and the reader feels elated that she finds some peace. The handling of the sections about the Troubles are deft and factual. This is a terrific book from a writer to watch

I loved this - it took me through a lot of emotions and it's different from other books out there at the moment. I'd definitely look out for something else from this author. Thank you.

Set during the 80th birthday party of a retired civil servant, Robert, and narrated from the viewpoints of Robert and his granddaughter Kate, this is a beautifully written story examining grief and our own sense of mortality.

There is a melancholy air hanging over the whole novel and a strange sense of foreboding throughout. Robert’s memories of his wife and the many regrets he now holds are especially moving. The section dealing with Kate’s mental illness and her eventual recovery is extremely convincing.

Loved this book and will definitely be reading his debut now!

A Grandfather on his eightieth birthday and his grand-daughter a mere quarter of a century old are the figureheads for the talented Barney Norris’s latest book, Turning For Home but don’t be mislead this is far deeper than the conventional birthday gathering where memories are both revived and made.

Robert Shawcross is eighty and despite the loss of his wife the year before he is holding his annual birthday party, the one Hattie his wife instigated when he was forty, originally conceived as an opportunity for the scattered family to gather. The party itself has diminished over the last few years with the decline in the older family members but Hattie’s sister Laura has taken up the baton and is there preparing the food for the gathering.

Robert is moved to reflect on his life, a civil servant he spent much of his time in Belfast and was there at the time of the Enniskellen bombing on Remembrance Sunday in 1987. A bomb which killed many civilians, missing the British Troops it was planned to kill. The reflection of this time is prompted by the arrest of the Sinn Fein Leader in 2014, the news hitting the press just before Robert’s big party. The Boston Tapes were recordings of interviews carried out with Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries between 2001 and 2006 on the understanding that they would not be published until the interviewee was dead, what it seems no-one had appreciated was that these men could implicate those still living, leading to the arrest of Gerry Adams following a police probe.

So we have real life events based on the 'Troubles' with both the Enniskellen bombing and the Boston Tapes but Barney Norris chooses smaller more intimate stories against this gigantic backdrop. We have Robert’s story, the part he thinks he played in the negotiations towards peace along with recognition that he was one small cog in a whole bigger wheel, told alongside his Grand-daughter, Kate's tale whose far shorter life hasn't been without its own struggles. Her story is less clear to begin with but with incremental revelations we see a young woman who had much to live for until tragedy struck and her life derailed leading to a spell in hospital. Kate’s story is of loss and of her search for something that perhaps will never materialise. This is a story of families who never really know the truth about each other and individuals who struggle with the gaps between the truth and hope.

And I think perhaps it’s very human as well. Isn’t the life of any person made up of the telling of two tales, after all? People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them.
This is a deeply poignant book, as books about characters nearing the end of their life are bound to be in some respects but it also has a message of hope. That just because the space between reality and dreams is wider than we’d like shouldn’t stop us from trying. Kate’s story is painful to read at times but worth persevering with, seeming just as relevant to this reader as the wider canvas that is its backdrop.

Barney Norris gives us both stories, interspersed with extracts from the Boston tapes, with lyrical prose and real depth. The struggles the two character's face being unique to them but the language used will strike a chord as it charts the rise and fall of human emotions that are common to all of our lives.

A fantastic tale of betrayal, of love and hope and all the great emotions we ride throughout our lifetimes bought down in scale reflected through two people’s eyes, hearts and minds.

I'd like to thank the publishers Transworld who allowed me to read a copy of Turning for Home before publication on 11 January 2018, a book I was keen to read having thoroughly enjoyed Barney Norris's debut novel Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain as well as Anne Cater for inviting me to be part of this blog tour. This unbiased review is my thanks to them and of course the author, Barney Norris.

Beautifully and lyrically written, I was soon totally absorbed in this book, alternating between Robert’s and Kate’s stories, as they reveal their thoughts and emotions, reflecting on their lives. It’s set on the day of Robert’s 80th birthday celebration. Still grieving after his wife’s recent death, he is finding it a sad, rather than a joyful occasion as the family gather together. His granddaughter, Kate is troubled at the thought of meeting her mother again after a three year estrangement. Then Robert’s day is interrupted by a phone call from Frank, a retired Oxford professor, whom he had known from his days as a civil servant working in Ireland, particularly at the time of the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen in 1987.

The narration is split between Robert and Kate interspersed with extracts from the Boston Tapes, an oral history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland recording the recollections of combatants on both sides. What Frank reveals to Robert shocks him and he struggles to come to terms with it. In parts it moves slowly, particularly as Kate reflects on her life, revealing what caused the break-up with her mother and recounting the pain she had gone through with her anorexia and the guilt she feels over her boyfriend’s car accident. I found it a moving book with emotional depth.

This is a slow read. And, for anyone reading advice about writing books that show and don’t tell, it breaks all the rules. Told in the first person by two alternating points of view, Robert and his granddaughter Kate, Turning for Home is nonetheless a fascinating account of the interior world.

So what’s it about? It’s about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, about the effect we can have on other people, about loss, mental illness and it’s about not eating.

Robert is a retired member of British Intelligence who worked in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. He is celebrating his 80th birthday when a former contact comes to see him at home to ask about a new investigation the British government are carrying out following a series of interviews of former combatants on both sides – a project undertaken by Boston College. The interviews brought out more secrets than anyone wished and there is danger of trouble stirring up again. Both men are afraid of repercussions, bother personally and politically.

Among the party guests is Kate, Robert’s granddaughter, who is recovering from a near death experience following an eating disorder. Kate is Robert’s ally, and he enlists her help to have his meeting uninterrupted. In return, he has always stood by her in her difficult relationship with her mother, a relationship seen by Kate as a possible trigger for her mental disorders. The two characters narrate the events of the party day to us, reminiscing over the past and recapping difficult decisions, painful memories and explaining slowly how they came to this point.

The book was inspired, if that’s the word, by the idea of eating – or, more accurately, not eating – as an act of control by the desperate, as a political act and as a personal one. It’s a loose thread but enough to hold the novel together and is thought provoking without the author hitting the reader over the head to make his point.

Both characters are real – grubby, sometimes mistaken, pig headed but ultimately loving and supportive to each other. I especially liked Kate and it can be the case that male characters mess up writing women, but Kate is perfectly done.

It’s a slow read and I think some may be tempted to give up before finishing, but I recommend sticking with it. It’s absorbing and rewarding in ways few books are these days, not an awful lot happens and yet we cover a lot of ground. It’s also worth saving it for a few days when you can devote a chunk of time to each chapter, rather than fleeting pages on the bus or whatever. It’s an intelligent book and asks questions of its readers.

It isn’t often one finds an author self-assessing their own novel at the end of said novel, and then pinpointing exactly what my thoughts are on the story in question.

Norris himself says that initially this started out as a story about the Boston Tapes. They started out as a series of frank interviews given by former loyalist and republican paramilitaries that chronicles their involvement in the Troubles, in an attempt to create an oral history of those times. In return for names, dates, places and details, the former paramilitaries made a deal that the interviews wouldn’t be made public until after their deaths.

Including the frank admission that Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams had his own squad within the IRA, who were responsible for the so-called ‘Disappeared’ of the Troubles. The people who were targeted, kidnapped, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA.

I digress.

Turning for Home is like reading two stories in one, and I am sure both would make excellent stand-alone novels. Together they become something special. A spark ignites and weaves its way through this poignant tale of pain, grief and control.

The reader follows Robert and Kate, grandfather and granddaughter. Their individual tales collide at the annual celebration for Robert’s birthday. A family reunion that has an air of finality to it, especially since the loss of Robert’s wife.

Robert is dealing with the implications of the Boston Tapes. The possibility of secrets being aired has some of his connections running scared, and after so many years the past has the power to insert itself into the future.

Kate’s story is a wee bit more complex. She suffers from anorexia nervosa, which comes under eating disorders in the DSM. Norris gives the reader a candid look into the thought process of someone with an eating disorder, and how many misconceptions there are about how to help someone with the disorder. Even so-called mental health professionals have difficulty really comprehending the grip it can have, and the impact it has on entire families.

It’s all about control and loss of control. When you experience loss of control it is a normal response to try and regain it. You start to look for the one thing no one else can control but you. Food, fat and calories become the enemy and you start to fight them with every inch of your body.

Aside from the obvious familial connection, the thread that connects both Robert and Kate, and their stories, is coping with loss and feelings of guilt. Unresolved emotional distress, trauma and conflict are the equivalent of malignant tumours in our bodies. Sometimes the inner enemy is evident and sometimes it is a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode.

Norris writes with a finesse and wisdom beyond his years. He has the gift of gab, a knack for telling a story and pulling his readers along with him on a journey even he doesn’t have the directions for. Eventually he brings himself and us home, regardless of wherever that may be.

This, Norris's second novel, is centred around a party being held by Robert Shawcross a retired senior government official who used to work in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The party is a big annual family gathering but Robert isn't looking forward to it - his beloved wife has recently died and he realises that the party was more about family than himself, despite it being held to celebrate his birthday. His granddaughter, Kate, is staying with him but she seems to have her own problems - this is her first attendance at a party for three years and she is dreading seeing her mother. This domestic scene is set against the Boston Tapes - which really did get made in the early years of the 2000s, a series of recorded interviews with both Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries. The participants were assured of anonymity so they confessed to more than just the motivations the interviewers were expecting - murders and other atrocities - and so, inevitably, the British government is very keen to get hold of the tapes. A figure from Robert's past, Frank Dunn, arrives at the party to reprise their roles from the 80s - liaisons with the British government and IRA respectively.

All the action in the book takes place over one day - the day of the party - but there are plenty of flashbacks: to the aftermath of Enniskillen, to the early days of Robert's relationship with his wife, and, in the case Kate, to her difficult relationship with her mother, the love of her young life and the accident and illness which changed her world. This doesn't sound like a lot of plot or story but there is enough there to keep you thinking about your own life and family. And the way it is written, the actual words on the page, is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Proper literature...

Barney Norris is an award winning play-writer and poet and now novelist (all before his is 30).

His debut play was "Visitors" described by the Guardian as striking for its "extraordinary understanding of the stresses and strains of old age and its highly unfashionable tribute to married love" and by the writer himself as a hymn to a "life long love" inspired by his grandparents seventy plus year marriage and his idea "put a marriage on stage, in the hope that other people might find the idea of a successful marriage as profound and beautiful as I do".

Further he said talking about his plays "Theatres are empathy engines: nothing is as effective as a good play at generating sympathetic understanding of other lives. I hope I have used that essentially loving act, the act of watching a play, suspending your own life and paying close attention to someone else’s, to encourage a wider consideration of the value to us of empathy, of love."

Norris's debut novel was "Five Rivers Meet on a Wooden Plain". Again quoting from the Guardian review, which captured my own views on that book: "There are different kinds of good writing. Technical skill – good prosody, pace, description and so on – counts for a lot, as does the ability to tell a story well. But there is another quality I look for, and it can’t be learned at writing classes. It shines out when characters are granted their complexity and handled with empathy and compassion, and it comes, I think, from being a decent human being. Judging by this tolerant and insightful debut, Norris has it in spades."

What you think of Norris's works will I think depend of own views not of the above sentiments (love, compassion and empathy) but whether you wish to see them celebrated in literature. For many writers and reviewers, increasingly it seems that literature is somehow only authentic or true literature when it celebrates and revels in their opposites (for example the 2015 Booker winner and one of the 2016 shortlist). I increasingly take my own view on the literature I wish to read from Philippians 4:8 and so am a big fan of Norris’s approach.

This book, Norris's second novel was initially based entirely around the Boston Tapes. These were a rather ill-judged project by Boston College to form an oral history of The Troubles in Ireland by recording candid interviews with loyalist and republican paramilitaries about their involvement on the understanding that the tapes would only be released on their deaths - an understanding which broke down when the security forces on both sides of the Atlantic realised they could not ignore what were effectively confessions to crimes, and which lead at one stage to the arrest of Gerry Adams. When Transworld announced that had signed the rights to the novel that described it as also tackling the issue of eating disorders - " a subject close to the author's heart", something also alluded to by a deeply touching acknowledgements section at the end of the novel. Via the theme of hunger strikes Norris brilliantly draws these themes together.

The book is effectively set the day of Gerry Adams arrest and the following day. In structure it consists of two alternating first person narrators - Robert a now retired, former UK diplomat based in Northern Ireland and his 20 something granddaughter Kate - broken up by fictional excerpts from the tapes.

Robert is 80, recently widowed, he has agreed to continue a long tradition practiced by his wife on his birthday of hosting a big family get together. Kate, we learn has been in hospital for nearly 3 years, is suffering from the aftermath of some form of accident and the memories of an old boyfriend Joe. She is estranged from her mother, who anticipates meeting for the first time in years at the party. She had hoped her student boyfriend Sam would join her, but he, as often the case is unable to face the idea of a large social occasion and has bailed out. Robert is contacted by his main historical liaison point with the IRA (a University professor) who wants to visit him to discuss the aftermath of the tapes.

As the alternating stories continue, and as greater insights into each character's backstory gradually emerge, we also gain further understanding of the pain at the heart of both Robert and Kate's life. Robert and Kate themselves are forced to understand more of what has happened to them and about the motivations (often hurt and pain driven) of those closest to them. One crucial character turns out (to the attentive reader) to be from Norris's debut novel, and although the characters are different, Robert's marriage and relationship with his wife clearly draw on the same inspiration as Norris's debut play.

Much of the writing and imagery is beautiful - Norris clearly drawing on his poetic skills. A few examples. Kate in hospital and trying to cut herself off from those who cared for her "My friends seemed moth-like and beautiful as they tried to reach me, beating their wings against the screen of my phone".. Kate reflecting in her Grandmother's love of family events: "she always loved to mark the little rhythms of the year, the birthdays and the holidays. They were the waves she swam over as she made her way out into the open water of her life. Her life always seemed to organise itself around preparing for the next celebration, the next wave rising to meet her."

And much of the best language is around the fundamental themes of the book - how we develop through life, and how our lives experiences shape us and shape those around us, about empathy, understanding, guilt, reconciliation, forgiveness. For example: "That’s how people hold on to their identities, and hold together their images of themselves, by remembering, playing out the feeling of their childhoods like a high clear note from a clarinet cutting through the hubbub of their buzzing adult lives." Or "What is needed is an amnesty, a forgetting. What might save us all is a way to put our lives behind us, and love facing into the future, not always turned back looking for the past. But the song of memory is forever calling."

Overall this is another excellent novel from a huge talent.

My thanks to Transworld Publishing for an ARC provided via Net Galley.

"There ought to be truth and reconciliation in every stratum of the lives people lead."

Barney Norris is a very talented young writer - playwright, poet and novelist - and his debut novel Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain was certainly striking if, to my taste, rather flawed (see
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1793845387)

His second novel Turning for Home was inspired by the true-life story of what came to be known as The Boston Tapes, a series of recorded interviews conducted in 2001-6 with (former) Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries. These were intended to be confidential and to be largely about their experiences and motivations, but in many of those interviewed, rather unexpectedly, confessed crimes and named names. In 2011, the Police Service of Northern Ireland began a legal bid to gain access to the tapes and on 30 April 2014, Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein was arrested based on allegations part founded on the material (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-27286543.).

This novel is set, although the characters thoughts journey back in time, almost entirely on the following day. Robert Shawcross, a grammar school boy from humble stock who rose to be a senior government official in Northern Ireland, but now retired, is celebrating his 80th birthday, but also reflecting on the tapes:

"They called them the Boston Tapes in the papers, not discs, not sound files. I thought that was strange at first; it made me wonder how the interviews had been recorded. I suppose it’s just the phrase still echoing onwards, even though we’ve surely all left cassettes behind by now. There is something about a tape that means the image holds interest long after it has been rendered technologically obsolete. The idea of a ribbon of speech, a voice speaking one truth on one side and then saying something else completely different on the other, two stories that might have contained anything at all, separated only by the breadth of the tongue they were told by. That is magical.

And I think perhaps it’s very human as well. Isn’t the life of any person made up of the telling of two tales, after all? People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them. People spin myths from the quotidian roots of their experience, in order to create a small cocoon of space in which they can live between the dream they could never hope to grasp and the indifferent ordinariness of everything around them, in which they can tell themselves things might be about to get exciting, no matter how cramped the quarters seem, how dark the dawn, how low the ceiling. "

Robert, living in a large country house, is the paterfamilias of a large extended family:

"A few years ago , it became clear to me that I was now occupying a role as de facto head of my family in its diaspora, as the generation that had come before me fell slowly and finally silent. "

and family tradition has an annual large gathering of the family (typically 100 or more people) at his house ostensibly to celebrate his birthday. But this year is the first he is hosting without his beloved wife, who died in the last year, so heavily coloured by sadness.

And he is also contacted and then visited on the same day by Frank Dunn, an retired Oxford professor, but who served as an unofficial communication conduit for talks with the IRA (with Robert representing the British government), notably in the immediate aftermath of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing. Frank, also retired, has been reactivated by senior Republicans to sound out Robert as to the British government's intentions with respect to the information revealed in the Tapes.

Robert's first person narrative alternates with that of his granddaughter Kate (see below) as well as fictionalised extracts from the Tapes. He reminded me of an Ishiguro narrator (from Remains of the Day, or Artist of the Floating World) looking back on his own part in historic events and perhaps overstating his role a touch. For example, he regards the dialogue between two 80 year old men as a sensible way even now to handle the concerns of the Republicans:

"It seems perfectly reasonable to me to mistrust the capacity of the younger generation to handle these old issues with the tact they require."

and he sees himself as now having a role to play in healing his family (see below):

"That is all I have ever wanted really - to have done my share. And perhaps in some way I have, in some walks of life. And perhaps there is still time to do more, to be of some use to my family."

Although unlike Ishiguro's narrators, Robert believes himself to be firmly on the right-side of history. However. as the novel progresses he does gain some new and unwelcome perspectives on his past dealings.

The alternating narration is by Kate, his 25 year-old granddaughter. We learn early on that this is the first birthday celebration she has attended for 3 years, that meanwhile there has been an accident and she has spent a lot of time in hospital, and that she is estranged from her mother, and indeed this party will be their first encounter for some time.

Kate is a deeply wounded character:

"It’s weird, but it always throws me when someone shows me kindness. I never think I deserve it. Even when I need someone’s sympathy, it still makes me feel sick to ask them for some understanding, because I’m sure one day, when I want reassurance, I’ll call someone and they’ll tell me I’m not worth their time, they’ve seen through the act, they don’t want to know me any more."

and her own account makes her childhood and her mother's treatment of her sound dreadful. For example a family dinner when her mother, unusually decides to cook typically ends with her first asking Kate to do the potatoes, then:

"‘You have to get those bits out with the end of the peeler! Can’t you see them? Why would you want to eat them? They’re disgusting. You have to get them out like this.’ She would snatch the potato and the peeler from my hands, and finish the job for me, sighing and harried. By the time dinner reached the table, and I sat down with Mum and Dad to eat, the air in the kitchen was usually thick with the threat of her censure."

Kate is also given to rather lengthy meditations on life which at times rather slow the narrative:

"On the day we’re born, the future lies infinite before us, and all our lives can be spoken of as lying the future. Then a change, a migration begins. Little by little you journey away from the place where you started, and start to grow a past for yourself, and trail that out behind you. In the end, a day comes when you have no future left at all, only the past tense to speak in. What nothing in the world ever changes, though, is the present. The present is always only one day long. It’s always now, and everywhere, and endless. And that’s the most important screen we have to protect us – the world we’re mired in, distractions and details and miracles of the everyday."

But her genuinely very moving story gradually filters out over the course of the novel. Indeed, perhaps Norris over-relies on withholding information. It's almost a quarter of the way through the book when we learn her mother's name, a third before we find out about the accident, past halfway when we find out about her time in hospital (although rather heavy hints are there from the early pages so it comes as no great surprise) and one crucial revelation is saved, twist-like, until the end.

That said this withholding does reflect her personality. She has a new boyfriend but they seldom discuss their pasts:

"We hardly talk at all about our different darknesses, our histories. We’ve picked up little secrets here and there.
…
No subject too big that it can’t be avoided with a cup of tea, a chat about the football. All real speech can happen through the secrecy of those intermediaries, and the steam rising from a cup of tea is the mast all hopes are hoisted on."

And the reference to the "intermediaries" is a deliberate nod to the roles played by intermediaries (such as Frank and Robert) in the Troubles. Ultimately Norris's theme as the opening quote suggests seems to be the need for truth and reconciliation all round, at the level of personal as well as societal conflicts. As Robert decided in his new found mission as peace intermediary for his family, but also reflecting on why so much was poured out in the Tapes:

"What people want above all isn’t just forgiveness. What people love is the dream of laying it all out into the open and letting the light play over the acts of their days, all crimes confessed, all sins revealed. The idea of amnesty is only the end of a process the whole world longs for: the comforting dark of the confessional, the ease of the psychiatrist’s couch, the non-judgemental blank sheet of paper listening to them, and the giving up of sins into words. Only then, at the end of all that, do they long for some absolution to come from baring the soul. Above all what everyone wants to do is sing of their sorrows and sins."

The “Boston Tapes” were an oral history project about the Irish Troubles, commenced by Boston College in 2001. Researchers conducted interviews with both republicans and loyalists, on the understanding that the transcripts of the interviews would not be released to the authorities, at least until the interviewees’ deaths. Years later, investigators sought access to the tapes, giving rise to legal and diplomatic issues which, it is often argued, might have had an impact on the Irish peace process.

This novel is inspired by the Boston Tapes, and short (fictitious?) extracts from the transcripts are included at salient points of the narrative. However, “Turning for Home” is neither about the Boston Tapes nor about the Troubles. Barney Norris seems less concerned with the “grand canvas” of History than with the intimate histories of his characters. Interwoven with the “tapes” are two first-person narrations. On the one hand, there is that of Robert Shawcross, a widower and retired civil servant, who was on placement in Belfast at the time of the Enniskellen bombing in 1987. In his understated way, Robert contributed to negotiations between the English Government and the Republicans following the bombing. On his 80th birthday, as family and friends converge on his country home for his yearly birthday party, he is briefly brought out of his retirement by two old contacts concerned about developments involving the Tapes. On the other hand, there is the narrative of his granddaughter Kate, still nursing the emotional and physical scars following a horrific accident. Kate returns to her Granddad’s party after a three-year absence, and has to face meeting her estranged mother, Robert’s daughter Hannah. Against the “set-piece” of the open-air party, we learn Kate and Robert’s stories and, through them, that of the persons close to them.

There is much to enjoy in Norris’s novel. For a start, the unobtrusive yet well-crafted way he builds the structure of the novel – the alternation between the voices of Robert and Kate (as well as the ‘Boston Tape’ witnesses) is elegant and flowing, yet Norris also knows how to keep some surprises up his sleeve. What binds the different narrations together are a number of common themes running throughout the book. The theme of history and memory, for instance; how the past shapes us and how we in turn shape our past (or our reading of it at least). There is also the theme of relationships and the sense of emptiness when these are lost or compromised – we are given to understand that both history and History are ultimately driven by personal relationships and personal needs. What struck me throughout the novel in fact was this context interplay between the public and the intimate, between the extraordinary and the mundane. The novel certainly tackles major philosophical themes, but it also deals with the everyday – characters get out of bed, have breakfast, go for walks, go to the bathroom, have normal conversations over lunch, argue about whether to wash the dishes or chuck them in the dishwasher. This is also reflected in the language of the novel. Often poetic and rich in eminently quotable “nuggets”, it nonetheless contains passages of unexpected simplicity. And this is, I think, what ultimately makes it so poignant and moving.

This didn’t turn out the way I expected it to, not that that’s a criticism. We have two narrations and at first Robert’s seems to dominate. He has retired from some kind of security role with the British Government, at one point dealing with Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. His former activities and contacts come back to haunt him with the threatened fall-out from the Boston Tapes, a supposedly confidential series of interviews with people who took part in operations on both sides.

Once his granddaughter Kate arrives to help celebrate his 80th birthday, her narration alternates with his and her story begins to take centre stage. A highly charged story it is, too, and I became very engaged with it - her physical and emotional breakdown, her estrangement from her mother and her struggle to move forward in life.

The two strands seem to have little in common apart from the family bond, but towards the end they become more entwined. If I read the author’s intentions correctly, we are led to see that amnesty is the only way forward for those in both predicaments. But amnesty is not enough really, the people involved hanker for, if not absolution, then at least avowal and acknowledgement of who did what to whom, the reasons for and the consequences of their actions. I felt a niggling feeling of foreboding throughout and was relieved that at least Kate’s story ends on a note of hope.

A slightly disjointed experience, but I enjoyed this novel very much, not least for its emotional depth and sensitive handling of the themes of guilt, abandonment and bereavement.

A large family get-together is always a good set piece for exposing dysfunctional family dynamics, which is the basis of this novel. Regrets, feelings of loss, grief and buried hostilities are brought to the surface as friends, relatives and offspring gather to celebrate a grandfather's 80th birthday. A surprising backstory emerges from the internal musings of two of the characters as the preparations unfold, in a deceptively low key build up of revelations. The fraught mother and daughter relationship is particularly poignant, with Norris showing unusually perceptive insight into a female point of view, whilst his skill as a dramatist is demonstrated in his command of dialogue, bringing the scenes alive. A lyrical and thought-provoking piece of literary fiction.