Involved - Softcover

A doctor’s daughter from Co. Cork, Kitty has led a charmed life – a blissful childhood followed by carefree student days and a job in her uncle’s Dublin firm. Danny O’Neill is a working class, Catholic Belfast boy, brought up in the shadow of the Troubles. Brooding, intense and secretive, Danny conceals a strange unhappiness which Kitty becomes determined to uncover ...

Taken to Belfast to meet Danny’s family, she begins to piece together the O’Neill puzzle. Wary and conspiratorial, the family – Ma, the formidable matriarch, her daughter Monica, and the eldest son Eamon, tense and malevolent – present a united front. Slowly but surely, delving into the life of Belfast and the O’Neills, Kitty begins to realise that Danny is inextricably bound up in their secret war, and that Ireland and the family will never let him go ...

Part love story, part psychological thriller, 'Involved' is a powerful first novel about the pull of family and conflict in Northern Ireland. A superb debut from a young, talented Irish writer, firmly in the tradition of Dermot Bolger and Colm Tóibín.

“Kate O’Riordan is a writer with the capacity to tell it how it is, not how we think it ought to be, and to tell it passionately, yet with humour and a sense of the power of language to move and change us.”
FAY WELDON