This is a story about a boy growing up in Belfast during the Troubles and eventually finding a sliver of solace in Irish traditional music. The author is a fiddler whom I had the pleasure of meeting and playing with in Belfast this summer. This is his first book, and it’s outstanding.

I’ve come to know Belfast relatively well over the past few years and I feel like I’m generally familiar with the contours of the Troubles (something that I’m afraid can’t be said for a lot of English people I’ve met, many of whom don’t even seem to entirely understand the difference between Northern Ireland and the Republic and why that difference exists), but I gleaned so much from this book about the texture of day-to-day life during the time, and also learned things I never knew before—such as that children were evacuated from Belfast on multiple occasions during the Troubles and taken to safer places, like a modern-day Kindertransport. Sometimes they were able to return home, but sometimes they were forced to leave forever.

This book follows one such story. It’s divided into three parts, with the first and last set in Belfast and the middle one in Kerry, to which the young protagonist, Geordie, is evacuated with his little brother when life in Belfast becomes too dangerous. The picture painted of Belfast in the 1970s is terribly grim, so when Geordie is whisked off to rural Kerry, it’s like a breath of fresh air. When he eventually returns to Belfast, the contrast between the bucolic life he had been leading and the harsh urban life he’s thrust back into is jolting, and Belfast seems even more threatening and claustrophobic in the last part of the book than it did in the first.

This is not a “feel-good” book, but there is great tenderness and emotion here, with music acting as a lifeline for a scared and lonely boy. It’s a moving, well-written tale and I highly recommend it.

Further reading…