cover image Nights Beneath the Nation

Nights Beneath the Nation

Denis Kehoe, Serpent's Tail, $14.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-84668-679-5

Kehoe's nuanced debut presents the passionate, painful, and angry tale of Daniel Ryan, freshly back in Dublin after 50 years in New York City. As Daniel acclimates to 1997 Dublin, he details his chaotic, vivid past there as a homosexual youth madly in love with Anthony Stafford, a young and perhaps unstable university student. Their mutual interest in drama hooks them up with Maeve O'Donnell, an older "lady of the theatre" who recruits them to play opposing roles in her production of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding. Meanwhile, the Daniel of 1997 acquaints himself with the new Dublin, with its gay bars and bathhouses, and befriends a 20-something writer named Gerard, who seems to offer a mysterious link to Daniel's troubled youth. Affecting and redeeming, this old-fashioned story of tormented love and longing takes some surprisingly brutal turns. (Aug.)