The last of Deeds

by Eoin McNamee

Set in a small northern Ireland fishing town, The Last of Deeds is narrated by a Catholic boy who must navigate the perilous terrain of his love for a Protestant girl. Treading carefully, sometimes fearfully along different divides - between sea and land, boyhood and manhood, the duties of faith and the compromises of desire - he bears witness to the small desperate wars for dignity fought by men and boys with nothing else to lose. Love in History moves back in time to an American air force base in Ireland during World War II. Interweaving images of Betty Grable's celluloid iconography with the flesh and blood of people, the novel examines the bygone glamour of a "good war": swaggering pilots who master the air, the women who anxiously await their return, and the triumphal presence of one nation occupying another.