Ireland, 1981. Eighteen-year-old Fergus is digging turf with his uncle near the North/South border when he uncovers the body of a young girl. This is no recent corpse: the girl’s body dates back some two thousand years and there is a noose around her neck.P> Meanwhile, Fergus’s brother Joe is in the Maze Prison and has just joined the hunger strike started by Bobby Sands, a decision which divides the family. Meanwhile, Fergus falls for Cora, a young woman in the architectural team investigating his find. On regular exercise runs in the hills he meets and befriends Owain, a Welshman serving with the British army. And then he begins to dream about the life of the girl whose body he found, whom he has called Mel, and he begins to find out her fate.

‘Bog Child’, Siobhan Dowd’s third novel, is a relatively short but complex story which examines themes of conflict of loyalties and self-sacrifice. Dowd’s use of the Irish Troubles – and the Maze hunger strike – avoids being simplistic: there is praise and blame on both sides. She tells her story in a distinctively plain and terse but often very vivid style (which reminded me at times of her distinguished countrywoman Jennifer Johnston). Published as for teenagers, this is a novel with depth and appeal to adults as well.

Siobhan Dowd published her first novel, the award-winning ‘A Swift Pure Cry’, in 1986, and ‘The London Eye Mystery’ (aimed at a slightly younger age group) followed a year later. Sadly she died in August 2007, aged just forty-seven, from breast cancer, a considerable loss to young-adult fiction. ‘Bog Child’ was published posthumously, as a fourth and final novel, ‘Solace of the Road’, will be in 2009.