Cushla Lavery

Cushla is a young woman from Northern Ireland who finds herself in a difficult family situation. Her mother, Gina, is an unrepentant alcoholic, and her brother, Eamonn, is prone to violent outbursts because he feels humiliated by the way he and his family are treated by the occupying British forces. Cushla works as a schoolteacher at a Catholic school, and her efforts to extend empathy and kindness to one of the schoolchildren, Davy, who has a Protestant mother, are met with resistance and anger by her superiors. In part as a response to these various stressors, Cushla begins having an extramarital affair with an English barrister named Michael Agnew.

Throughout the novel, Cushla struggles to justify her actions to herself while also reckoning with the impossible choices set before her by the violence that ravages her community. Although she loves people on both sides of the conflict...