Bog Child

Deservedly shortlisted for a major fiction prize, this novel for teenagers about the troubles in Northern Ireland was complex and beautifully delicate. Fergus is an eighteen year old boy, studying hard to get the grades required to leave Northern Ireland and become a Doctor. His summer is disrupted when his older brother is arrested and put in the Maze prison as a political prisoner. It is never entirely clear what the brother has done, but he embarks on a hunger strike with his fellow prisoners and as Fergus grows into adulthood very quickly, discovering an Iron age body in a peat bog, getting a new girlfriend and learning to drive, his brother starts to waste away.Fergus dreams of the peat bog woman, and his dreams foreshadow and become interwoven with the complexities of his life as he is forced to take sides, make a stand and learn how to be a man.There are no easy answers in this text, and much is left deliberately ambiguous and 'grey', but this is like life itself, difficult, demanding and messy.Sensitively written and all the more powerful for it.

My son 12 loves this book

Quite hard to put this book down - incorporated Irish history so there is a realness to the novel that makes it totally absorbing.

Great book

Perfect condition