Inventory: A Memoir

Poverty, suicide, and Northern Ireland’s sectarian bloodshed shadow this bleak coming-of-age saga as Anderson (Imaginary Cities) recalls growing up in the 1980s and ’90s in a Catholic neighborhood in Derry, site of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 protesters by British soldiers. It’s a tense, atmospheric study of life in a war zone: gunfire echoed at night, killing innocents; IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries targeted each other—and suspect civilians—with bombings and shootings; Anderson and his pals dodged army patrols (while the patrols dodged snipers), endured humiliations at checkpoints and faced vicious beatings if they strayed into the wrong street. He also recounts his equally conflicted family history, including his maternal grandfather’s domestic violence, his father’s boyhood in a squatter camp and stint in the IRA, and his relatives’ propensity for drowning, sometimes intentionally, in the River Foyle, a murky, mysterious presence threading through his vivid cityscape of Derry. Anderson’s evocative prose takes disasters in stride while measuring their toll with restrained lyricism. (“[A]ll the things they’d owned... were just smoldering ash and debris, charred imitations of what they had once been, in rooms with no roof, under a sky innocent in its ignorance,” he writes of an anti-Catholic arson.) The result is a grim but engrossing frontline take on the Troubles. (Aug.)