A country at war that will not use the word "war" has already told you something about itself. Kirkus's review of David Chadwick's Emerald Reich opens in March of 1942, with Ireland holding hard to its neutrality and the government referring to the war as the "Emergency" — a word chosen to keep a nation out of a thing by refusing to name it. The dissension runs underneath that word: some characters favor the Germans, believing they offer the best road to a reunited Ireland, and others pull the other way. The argument is about the country's future, and it is conducted in vocabulary.
Read the week's literary coverage side by side and that pattern keeps surfacing. The story is rarely just what happened. It is what people decided to call it.
"The Emergency" is a small masterpiece of its type: accurate enough to survive scrutiny, vague enough to commit to nothing.