Marty Ransom, son of the Captain and heir to a hilltop estate near Waterford in independent Ireland, lives a comfortable, boring life with his tennis-playing wife, Sugar, a vicar's daughter, and his job in the Department of External Affairs. Among their closest friends are an Anglo-Irish couple, a banker who was Sugar's childhood flame and his alluring diplomat wife, Alison. But Marty is a man divided. While his father fought with the British Army...

The Troubles may have developed into a sectarian conflict, but the violence was sparked by a small band of leftists who wanted Derry in October 1968 to be a repeat of Paris in May of the same year. Like their French comrades, Northern Ireland's 'sixty-eighters' had assumed that street fighting would lead to political struggle. The struggle that followed, however, was between communities rather than classes. In the divided society of Northern Ireland,...