On the edge

摘要

If your maternal grandfather was a Maronite Christian from Mersin in southern Turkey who was interned by the British near Jerusalem for more than three years during the second world war, a war in which his country was nominally neutral; and if your paternal grandfather was a member of the IRA who was interned in the notorious Curragh prison in the nominally neutral Irish republic for four-and-a-half years at more or less the same time, that coincidence alone would make a strong enough theme for a book. When the circumstances of the two men's detention are mysterious and their grandson is a writer of Joseph O'Neill's calibre, then that book becomes several things at once: a gripping detective story, a thoughtful enquiry into nationalism, and a moving evocation of world war at the edges of its European theatre.