Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd

I don't always adore books that have won this or that prize or medal, but when they're "young adult" books it's far more likely, and all I can do is join the millions of people who seem to have loved this book...  It's a story about the life of Fergus McCann, who is studying for his "A"-levels, trying to keep out of the Provos way, to fall in love, to keep faith with his brother in Long Kesh (the Maze) and to find out why a young girl seems to have been buried in a bog, thousands of years ago... All he really wants is to run, to pass his exams, and to go away to university and become a doctor - but life is never quite that simple.

I think one of the things I loved about this book is that Fergus' life wasn't made out to be simple - it wasn't just an adventure, or just a romance, or just a coming-of-age book, because that's not the way the world works.  Fergus is an ordinary, thoughtful young lad, and all the complications come together at the same time, just as they really have a tendency to do.  It's a story about the tangle of life, and how to deal with it, and I thought it was perfectly and fully written, and I was with Fergus every step of the way...

Not only that, but it turns out that Siobhan Dowd sounds like a brilliant woman - someone who didn't deserve to die so young (at 57, of breast cancer) when she was doing such good things in the world... I'm definitely going to look up her other stories.