Victims

(Victims is a story as topical as today's headlines - the gripping account of a ruthlessly planned hostage - seizing operation by IRA agents. The victims, an Anglo-Irish family and the friends who happen to be spending the evening with them, are cultured and complex people who have regarded themselves as above the battle. Now, suddenly, they are dangerously involved; and, as an ironic twist to the situation, there is some common ground, they find, between them and some of their captors. But at least these dedicated terrorists - or some of them - appear to be open to reasoning and hard bargaining. Everyone who feels concerned about the situation in Ulster will find Victims compelling and appalling. Here is, in truth, an 'inside story', conveying with deep insight and terrible force the passions that are dividing the country. Eugene McCabe, who lives in County Monaghan, is well known as a play-wright in Ireland. He has twice won the Dublin Festival Prize and has written a number of TV plays for transmission north and south of the border. This is his first novel, and in dramatised form it has been televised by Radio Telefis Eireann.