Frances Creighton : found and lost

Unable to cope with his English girlfriend’s death, Michael Roberts finds himself thinking back to another time and another place when he was in love for the first time.

But that was when he was as a schoolboy in Belfast, at the start of The Troubles in the late 1960s, and in a culture dominated by divides that weren’t just sectarian.

To his surprise and increasing torment, his memories— long buried—prove elusive, so that struggling to remember what happened and why he had suppressed it becomes more and more of an obsession.

Frances Creighton: Found and Lost is a deeply felt first novel that conveys the pain of late adolescence in a community where school and religion add more layers of cruelty to the under- lying instability of daily life and Northern Irish politics.