A suddenly transformed, guilt-ridden Eamon visits a prostitute: a blowsy, obese woman offering mumsy suckling (the guilt business is apparently due to a boyhood incident in which his mother threatened to Bobbit him with a kitchen knife). He does so in front of the man's wife and son, coldbloodedly and in a way that is utterly at odds with the silent sulkiness he seems to suffer from at home. Normal life seemed to be rendered invisible, even null and void, by the welter of bombs and terror besetting the place Kate O'Riordan's first novel redresses the balance. Involved begins with a long night for Eamon O'Neill, a young IRA volunteer who, on his travels, first savagely threatens an informer. News coverage of Belfast showed it to be a bombed- out hell-hole of terrible deprivation. ONE of the criticisms levelled against the media during the Northern Ireland conflict was that mainland Britain never got an idea of what it was like to live with the Troubles: how families and communities managed to survive day by day.

It should be read by everyone who cares about the truths behind the clichd Beirut of the TV news; and by everyone who cares about the more enduring, and universal, truths of the heart.. Make sure the larder and the fridge are never empty.In this, her finest novel, fluently translated by Catherine Cobham, Hanan al-Shaykh makes that act of remembrance, joining it to an unforgettable portrait of a broken city. "You [the War] give them confidence and a kind of serenity; people make this precious discovery and play your game."What shall I do with these ideas? agonises Asmahan, and perhaps the best answer lies in her indomitable grandmother's advice Remember who we are. to save them searching further afield and investigating the mysteries of life and death," Asmahan writes. Old place-names have lost meaning and new ones have sprung up. There are Palestinians who speak a Beckettian language: "I'll have to kill myself. No, I must keep going," and there are militias and terrorists, and there is the War, "People have a desperate need to enter any conflict which has become familiar...

Here are cows that have become addicted to cannabis, and Iranian signs on shopfronts, and plastic-bottle trees. So in some strange way I can persuade myself that I'm worse off than them ... For I'm still in my own place, but separated from it in a painful way: this is my city and I don't recognise it."Al-Shaykh brings to this transformed Beirut a passion of description. What does it mean to be kidnapped? Being separated forcibly from your environment, family, friends, home, bed. Her attachment to Beirut is very deep, even though, in a letter to campaigner Jill Morrell, she compares herself to the hostages "My mind is no longer my own ... I possess my body but not, even temporarily, the ground I walk on. Perhaps, in the name of love, she must become like Hayat, her friend and mirror-soul, for whom she has felt such pity, even scorn.It would be wrong to reveal Asmahan's final choice, but it is not easily made.