# A New Novel Imagines a Flooded Northern Ireland to Confront the Troubles' Unfinished Legacy > Jan Carson's new novel Few and Far Between uses an alternate history built around a real 1958 scheme to drain Lough Neagh as a way into Northern Ireland's still-unresolved reckoning with its sectarian past, according to a review in Foreign Policy. - Source: Foreign Time - Canonical URL: https://foreigntime.com/article/few-and-far-between-novel-northern-ireland-troubles-legacy - Author: Foreign Time Newsroom - Section: World Politics - Published: 2026-08-21T16:32:44.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-21T16:32:44.000Z - Tags: World Politics, Northern Ireland, The Troubles, Books --- A new novel by the Northern Irish writer Jan Carson is drawing attention for the way it folds the region's unresolved history into an invented one. According to a review by Maxine Davey in Foreign Policy, Few and Far Between builds its story around a real proposal from 1958, when Northern Irish leader Terence O'Neill floated the idea of draining Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the British Isles. In reality the scheme was quickly judged unworkable and abandoned. In Carson's novel, it goes partly ahead. The book imagines the drained lake leaving behind a receded shoreline and a cluster of islands, and it follows a young anthropologist named Alex as she returns to that place to examine her own history. Her mixed Catholic and Protestant parents raised her there, on ground that, as the Troubles took hold in the late 1960s, became a refuge for people in mixed religious marriages and others who faced discrimination elsewhere in Northern Ireland. Davey's review notes that Carson, as in her earlier fiction, combines dark humor with magical realism to work through the lingering effects of the Troubles alongside more contemporary anxieties, and to examine the pull of nostalgia in both personal life and politics. The novel arrives while Northern Ireland's real history from the same period remains an open, active matter of public accounting. The Troubles were a roughly three decade sectarian conflict between Protestant unionists, who wanted Northern Ireland to stay part of the United Kingdom, and Catholic nationalists, who wanted it to join a united Ireland. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement is generally credited with ending the fighting, but four months after it was signed, the Irish Republican Army carried out the Omagh bombing, killing 29 people. It remains the deadliest single terrorist attack in Northern Ireland's history. That history is still being litigated in a formal sense. Foreign Policy's review points out that Northern Ireland established an independent inquiry in 2024 to examine whether British state authorities could have prevented the Omagh bombing. Two years in, the inquiry is still ongoing, slowed by the difficulty of working with evidence that is now more than a quarter century old and by how painful it remains for those involved to revisit it. Read against that backdrop, Davey frames Carson's novel less as an escape from Northern Ireland's history than as another way of approaching it, using an invented flood and an invented island to ask the same questions the region's courts and inquiries are still working through in the real world: what is owed to the people who lived through the Troubles, and what does it cost to keep looking back at them. --- Originally published by Foreign Time. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://foreigntime.com/article/few-and-far-between-novel-northern-ireland-troubles-legacy.