The Walk Home - 9780307908810

From the acclaimed author of the Booker-nominated The Dark Room: a novel of divided loyalties within a Protestant Irish family, the bitterness that wrenches it apart, and the hard-won understanding necessary for its healing.

Displaced from Ireland during the Troubles, young Stevie's family has been living in Glasgow for decades, but memories are long, and their dark history has stayed with them. His mother, Lindsey, fled Ireland and her dogmatic father only to find her new home haunted by the same religious divisions. Stevie's father, Graham, is keen to build a good life for his wife and child, even as the past and his community start to draw him away from them: in a marching band since boyhood, he plays in the annual Protestant Orange Walk through Glasgow, but when his bandmates reveal links to loyalist paramilitaries from Belfast, his marriage and home are threatened, and his young son's life begins to be pulled apart. The Walk Home examines the risk of love, the push and pull of family and community, and the ties that bind you to your past. Without your history, who are you? If you cut your ties, will you cut yourself adrift? Gripping, haunting and, finally, hopeful, this is a sharply evocative tale of one family's struggle to throw off the burden of history.