A note explains the title: the 643 small red chairs laid out along the high street of Sarajevo in 2012 to represent the children killed by snipers and artillery during the city’s siege by Bosnian Serb forces. In Edna O’Brien’s latest novel, this distant tragedy has a shocking impact on a small, complacent Irish village. A stranger arrives in the one-horse town of Cloonoila, claiming to be from Montenegro. From the start, he emanates a brooding sense of wrong: “Your people have suffered injustices just as my people have.” He reads Ovid, another poetic exile, in the original and namechecks Siddhartha in the local pub. Initially a figure of fun, he sets himself up as a spiritual healer, masseur and “sex therapist”. Soon “Dr Vladimir” has