As Strangers Here
JANET McNEILL

As Elizabeth Bowen observed in 1942, with characteristic precision and tragic prescience, “In the matter of the Troubles and Ireland and houses and behaviour on both sides, no fiction could improve upon or exaggerate reality.”  The literature that mapped the recrudescence of the Troubles in Ulster for the three decades from the late 1960s is rarely credited with much ambivalence. With Bernard MacLaverty and Seamuses Deane and Heaney just a few of the luminaries in one corner, As Strangers Here, reprinted for the first time since its original publication in 1960, is a revealing exemplar from the other, less crowded side in the conflict.