Belfast, May 1987. Sean Callahan, thirty-one years old, an IRA operative in the Catholic neighborhoods of Falls Road, learns that his older brother has been killed in the Loughgall ambush. Eight men. A probable betrayal. Someone talked. For the first time in his life, Sean does what the Callahans never do: he leaves. Boston, Massachusetts, through a quiet Irish-American network. A construction job.
An apartment in the South End. Distance from everything he was. Then he meets Sarah Murphy - a nurse, hazel eyes, who doesn't ask questions she doesn't need answered. But in March 1988, his father and younger brother are killed in turn. On a road in Armagh. By the same hands that sold out Loughgall. And Sean Callahan crosses the Atlantic in the other direction. Blood of Ulster is a novel about loyalty and its limits, about what we inherit without choosing it, about how one life is betrayed in order to build another.
It is also a love story - taut, quiet, built on two people who decide, against everything, to stay. Belfast. Boston. 1987-1988. A son. And what remains when everything else has been settled.
Belfast, May 1987. Sean Callahan, thirty-one years old, an IRA operative in the Catholic neighborhoods of Falls Road, learns that his older brother has been killed in the Loughgall ambush. Eight men. A probable betrayal. Someone talked. For the first time in his life, Sean does what the Callahans never do: he leaves. Boston, Massachusetts, through a quiet Irish-American network. A construction job.
An apartment in the South End. Distance from everything he was. Then he meets Sarah Murphy - a nurse, hazel eyes, who doesn't ask questions she doesn't need answered. But in March 1988, his father and younger brother are killed in turn. On a road in Armagh. By the same hands that sold out Loughgall. And Sean Callahan crosses the Atlantic in the other direction. Blood of Ulster is a novel about loyalty and its limits, about what we inherit without choosing it, about how one life is betrayed in order to build another.
It is also a love story - taut, quiet, built on two people who decide, against everything, to stay. Belfast. Boston. 1987-1988. A son. And what remains when everything else has been settled.