TURNING FOR HOME

Doubleday, 272pp, £14.99, Oldie price £9.93

Turning for Home is a second novel from a prize-winning playwright still in his twenties. The narrative is divided between Robert, a retired civil servant grieving for his wife as he prepares to give an 80th birthday party, and his grand-daughter Kate, also grieving for a lover and steeling herself to meet the mother from whom she has been estranged since the loss of the lover some years earlier. The scene is set for interruption and dysfunction after Robert, who has played an important part in negotiating the fragile peace in Northern Ireland, receives an ominous phone call on the morning of his garden party from a former colleague, insisting on an urgent meeting.

John Boyne in the Irish Times admired the ‘depiction of how, when it comes to conflict, the familial can be just as problematic as the political’. He also welcomed an ‘insightful’ exploration of the Troubles. But Siobhan Murphy in the Times found the fictionalised excerpts from the Boston tapes – a series of real-life confessions from players on both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland – ‘increasingly incongruous’. Nor was she enthusiastic about the Kate storyline, disliking that young woman’s ‘unrealistic urge to make sweeping pronouncements about the human condition (for instance, that “whenever you see a person washing up a cup, if you look close enough you’ll see them consigning something forever to memory”)’. But in the

Guardian Hannah Beckerman, while describing the novel as ‘uneven’, praised Norris’s great sensitivity in handling well-worn themes of loneliness, regret and reconciliation.

‘The familial can be just as problematic as the political’