num_pages: 201
description: Bearing the same name as William Steven’s famous poem from 1982, Brian Moore’s novel reads like his own life and his time with the Air Raid Precautions. Gavin Burke is a young citizen of Belfast with Nationalist heritage and a desire to join the ARP during WWII. Against his family’s wishes, he leaves Belfast, admitting that “War was freedom, freedom from futures” – a nod to the stagnant religious pressures that existed in Northern Ireland since the Partition of Ireland in 1921. Moore, too, left Belfast in 1943 to join the British Ministry of War Transport and worked for a period with the ARP. The novel takes you through Gavin’s journey as he grows up in a city that restricts him, realising that his presupposed enemies were his only opportunity to escape.
language: English
title: The Emperor of Ice Cream
titlecomplete: The Emperor of Ice Cream
genres: 20th Century, Classics, Irish Literature, Novels, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Ireland
ratings_count: 175
publisher: Penguin Books