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| | | These Days by Lucy Caldwell review – a haunting novel of the Belfast blitz | | by Joseph O'Connor Mar 2, 2022 | | The prize-winning short-story writer and playwright brilliantly evokes wartime love and heartbreak This fine novel by one of Northern Ireland’s most accomplished contemporary writers is set against the Belfast blitz, a series of attacks on the city by the Luftwaffe in 1941. Lucy Caldwell’s evocation of the violence and destruction is terrifying. Familiar avenues and buildings become a dystopia out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. “There are dogs who have survived their owners, congregating now in cowering, starving packs in the brickfields and the mill fields and the parks.” Dread builds by day. Whole streets disappear by night. “The Germans will come again, everyone knows it. It’s just a question of when.” The citizens bargain with fate; perhaps the bombers will only attack the city’s factories and shipbuilding yards, not its residential neighbourhoods and acres of Victorian working-class housing. An exodus of evacuees is heading for the countryside: “Cars, carts, bicycles, perambulators, bath chairs … anything with wheels. The rag and bone men, the coke men, the auldfellas with their ice cream trikes.” And at the heart of the story are more personal disturbances, making the book something richer than a well-wrought historical novel. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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