Ireland is a factory of writers who are not afraid to mix “literature and politics”: perhaps because they are braver, perhaps because they have experienced more hardship, perhaps because they have such a powerful literary tradition (with an imposed language, but that would be another debate) they have the tools and the will for anything. And such a entrenched and painful conflict as has occurred in this country yields results like the work of Audrey Magee, whose poignant The Colony (Periscopi, 2024) we already knew, and from whom we now receive The Commitment, an earlier novel, but no less interesting or current for that: the typical historical novel that makes you think, a lot, about what we would do today if a war broke out. The answers it gives are quite distressing: surely we are all more selfish and submissive than we imagine.