Heard this on Radio 4 a few weeks ago and enjoyed it enough to read. It is very good; a coming of age novel about an 18 year old boy who lives absolutely on the cusp between Northern and Southern Ireland in, I think, the 1980’s (Hunger strikes in Long Kesh). His brother is a prisoner and becomes a hunger striker. Fergus and his uncle (an IRA man it transpires) are stealing peat from the border and discover a body buried in the peat. Assuming it is of recent provence, they call the Gardai, but it transpires to be an Iron Age frozen corpse.
Fergus is trying to do his A levels with a view to escaping Ireland for university in Scotland, but is pressurised by a local IRA man to use his running skills to smuggle unidentified stuff across the border. He meets a young Welsh soldier at the checkpoint and they become friends. (She does pack an awful lot into her plots, see 739), and it would take another page to summarise this one. Suffice to say, I enjoyed it.
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