Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other Book

"All stories are love stories," begins Eureka Street. Set in Belfast before and after the latest cease-fire, it takes us into the lives and families of Chuckie Lurgan and Jake Jackson, a Protestant and a Catholic - unlikely pals and staunch allies in a world of Northern Irish troubles, a world where your street address can either save your life or send it up the creek, depending on whom you run into. The barometric pressure of Belfast's moods is measured in graffiti. Everybody recognizes "IRA" and "UVF" and "FTQ" ("F-k the Queen"), as well as "FTP" (it concerns the pope). But when "OTG" begins appearing on walls throughout the city, the locals are stumped. A new paramilitary organization? A coded message of redemption? A joke? The harder they try to decipher "OTG," the more it reflects the passions and paranoias that govern and divide them. Chuckie and Jake are as mystified as everyone else. In the meantime they try to carve out lives for themselves in the battlefield they call home. Chuckie falls in love with an American who is living in Belfast to escape the violence in her own land; the best Jake can do is to get into a hilarious and remorseless war of insults with a beautiful but spitfire republican whose Irish name, properly pronounced, sounds to him like someone choking. All stories may be love stories, but the road to the real thing never ran in a straight line, and sometimes is blockaded by checkpoints and barbed wire. The real love story in Eureka Street involves Belfast - the city's soul and spirit, its will to survive the worst it can do to itself.

Publishers Weekly

"All stories are love stories." So begins the first American novel from Irish Book Award winner Wilson. How rare, though, for that emotion to be as unabashedly and enthusiastically expressed as it is here. Wilson clearly has grand intentions: a love story to a city set in a remarkable moment in historyBelfast in the months preceding and, briefly, following the first IRA cease-fire. His effort succeeds (mostly), because it grounds itself in the unremarkable lives of two buddies, Protestant Chuckie Lurgan and Catholic Jake Jackson, and their circle of friends. When Chuckie turns 30, he decides to make something of his life. He becomes a successful entrepreneur and falls in love with an American expatriate, Max. Jake is less settled; he works steadily in various blue-collar jobs (for which he is overqualified) and falls in and out of blustery love with several women. The chapters alternate between a third-person account of Chuckie and Jake's first-person narrative. The politics and history of the city are incorporated into these lives remarkably well: e.g., radio news reports and the mysterious graffito ("OTG") that the characters try to decipher throughout the novel. Despite a satirical sensibility that favors broadness over poignancy, Wilson's sheer exuberance saves this winning story of two men and a community at odds with itself. (Oct.)