Call my Brother Back

By Michael McLaverty, 1939

Belfast writers, including Glenn Patterson, regard this as the “must read” novel about Belfast. Set in the 1920s, it is in many ways a model for novels of the later Troubles, approaching political violence through the experience of one family, the MacNeills. Amid the police raids and gun battles, the passages that linger are of school life, of kickabouts on waste ground and Sunday walks.