Great Sex in the Time of War
Not many novels mix juicy romance and wartime violence. War-induced longing is a common fictional occurrence—consider Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, or, to a lesser degree, Ian McEwan’s Atonement—but a vivid, sexy, not-doomed-feeling love story that also takes a war zone as a central subject rather than simply a setting is rarer.
Of course, this rarity is rooted in old, gendered ideas about literary subject matter: Combat and the romantic separation it can cause are (supposedly) serious fodder for male writers, while flirtation and anticipation—the fun parts of coupling up—are not. But in her first novel, , the Irish writer Louise Kennedy doesn’t shy away from either fun or femininity. Nor does Kennedy avert her eyes from the Troubles, the era during which her novel is set. By attending to romance and courtship,
