On 21 November 1974, two pubs exploded in the centre of Birmingham, in what was Britain’s deadliest terrorist attack between 1945 and 2005. In The Trick to Time, writer Kit de Waal, who was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother and a Caribbean father, is alert to the long-lasting implications of the tragedy that affected her home city in 1974. But she keeps the actual bombings offstage.