The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

Although it never ventures beyond the frontiers of America there are times when its 700 pages seem to contain as much violence — fistfights, guns, bombs, bloodbaths — as the conflict in Europe.

It tells the stories of two young men, one black, one white. Luther Laurence is a skilled mechanic in a munitions factory whose job is given to a returning war veteran..

He moves to Tulsa where he operates a hotel elevator by day and runs numbers by night. When a fellow runner and junkie shoots their boss, Luther is forced to leave behind his wife and child and flee to Boston where he gets a job in the Coughlin household.

Thomas Coughlin is a vicious police captain. He has three sons: Danny, 27, another cop; Connor, a future District Attorney; and 11- year-old Joe. Danny and Connor are both in love with the housemaid, Nora, a stray taken in by their father whose past is about to catch up with her in an explosive way.

Lehane's portrait of this warring Irish family is the best thing in the book. Their personal battles are set against the social upheavals of the time: rabid racism, the Spanish flu pandemic and the Boston police strike that sees the city burn.

Danny, originally sent undercover to report on the myriad anarchist cells causing mayhem in the streets, is gradually won over to the side of the disgruntled cops who want to strike — much to the disgust of his father. A misguided affair with a fiery Italian woman who turns out to be a terrorist does not help his case. He learns the hard way that: "The mean things of this world had only one lesson — we are meaner than you'd ever imagine." Lehane draws modern parallels with a light touch. The terrorists "hate the life we have because it's better than theirs". Only the career of Babe Ruth, interleaved with the main narrative, drags.

Not many British readers will care about long-dead striking baseball players. If this isn't, finally, the Great American Novel it is intended to be, it is still a deeply impressive, heartfelt hymn to what makes America great..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Danny Coughlin is Boston Police Department royalty and the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains. His beat is the predominately Italian neighbourhoods of the North End where political dissent is in the air - fresh and intoxicating. On the hunt for hard-line radicals as a favour to his father, Danny is drawn into the ideological fray and finds his loyalties compromised as the police department itself becomes swept up in potentially violent labour strife. Luther Lawrence is on the run. A suspect in a nightclub shooting in Oklahoma, he flees to Boston, leaving his wife behind.He lands a job in the Coughlin household and meets Danny and the family's Irish maid, Nora, who once had a powerful bond. As the mystery of their relationship unravels, Luther finds himself befriending them both even as the turmoil in his own life threatens to overwhelm him. Desperate to return to his wife and child, he must confront the past that has followed him and settle scores with enemies old and new. Set at the end of the Great War, "The Given Day" is meticulously researched and expertly plotted, it will transport you to an unforgettable time and place.