Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #350323 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Set in Belfast during the Troubles, Dean's accomplished second novel (after Becoming Strangers) is an affecting and well-researched depiction of the political and social strife of Northern Ireland in the winter of 1979. John Dunne, a 20-year veteran of the British army, takes a job as a prison guard at Belfast's Maze prison and is assigned to work in the squalid high-security block where the most hardened IRA inmates are engaged in a protest they call the Blanket (the inmates refuse to wear clothes and smear their feces on the cell walls—one enterprising pair "paints" a fireplace). A newly arrived inmate, Sean Moran, imprisoned for his part in the bombing death of a policeman, becomes pivotal in the plan to take the protest to the next level. On the outside, Sean's mother, Kathleen, struggles to raise her remaining children while British soldiers routinely search her house for weapons, and John grows close with his adult illegitimate son. The possibility of violence is ever-present, especially for John, whose job makes him a target on and off the clock. Dean writes strong characters and provides a sympathetic rendering of both sides of the conflict, making for a powerful and memorable novel. (Feb.)
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From Booklist
The stench of human excrement greets 22-year-old John Dunn when in late 1979 he reports for his first shift as a guard on the "protest blocks" at Belfast's Maze prison, where the "politicals" are lucky to have a blanket in cells so cold they see their breath. Principal Officer Bolton runs the place by the book and remarks that these prisoners' religion isn't Catholicism, it's suffering: "They're good at being oppressed." One inmate has died on a hunger strike, the situation in the prison has "deteriorated into a deadlock," and rumors fly, through and beyond the Maze, of another major strike looming. Dean, born after the era she depicts, presents Northern Ireland's troubles at their height, groups of small boys routinely spending afternoons "gathering stones for the evening's rioting," and an inmate such as the novel's Sean Moran becoming a force in the protest. She captures the sounds and textures of the time and place with compelling power as she precisely limns two young men and their families striving for freedom. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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