Jude Cook

Looking for Trouble

For the Good Times

By

Faber & Faber 348pp £12.99) order from our bookshop

David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device, was a starkly sad and often very funny exploration of Airdrie’s post-punk scene. His second, For the Good Times, drops the unsuspecting reader straight into the ‘black fucking night of 1970s Northern Ireland, the best decade what ever lived’. This apparently paradoxical statement sums up the book’s ambiguous stance towards its tableaux of relentless brutality.

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