Growing up in the Shadow of 'The Troubles'

Two Booker Prize Shortlist nominees, both Irish authors writing about the Troubles, their stories focused on the City of Derry, Northern Ireland.

Shadows on our Skin by Jennifer Johnston.

Recognised as a small masterpiece when first published in 1977, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A poignant novel about a boy in Derry jolted into early adulthood by harsh circumstances.

Derry in the 1970s: teenager Joe Logan is growing up in the teeth of the Troubles, having to cope with embittered parents, a brother who's been away and come back with money and a gun in his pocket, harsh school teachers, and the constant awareness of the military presence in the background. Central to the story is the friendship that tentatively grows up between Joe and Kathleen, a young school-teacher who brings a fresh perspective to his familiar world.


Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane, shortlisted in 1996

"What we misleadingly call ordinary life is destroyed by politics in our part of the world, generation after generation. I had to show how that happens." Seamus Deane

A haunted childhood, lived out in two dimensions. One is legendary: the Sun-fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly; the house in Donegal where children are stolen away by demonic forces. The other is actual: the city of Derry in the Northern Ireland of the 40s and 50s; a place that is also haunted by political enmities, family secrets, lethal intrigue. The boy narrator of Reading in the Dark grows up enclosed in these two worlds, sensing that they are intertwined in some mysterious ways that he both wants and does not want to discover. Through the silence that surrounds him, he feels the truth spreading like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. Claustrophobic but lyrically charged, breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up - in Ireland or anywhere - that has ever been written.