Q: What is Crossing Over about?

Crossing Over is a legal thriller set in Belfast in 1987. Lena Dawson, a young London lawyer who arrives in Northern Ireland determined to improve her career chances runs straight into trouble. Defending a leading loyalist paramilitary, she quickly makes a dangerous enemy of a powerful QC. An IRA godfather then challenges her to investigate what he claims is the police ambush and killing of his brother – a claim she doesn’t believe for a second. She gradually begins to unravel a conspiracy reaching from Belfast’s back streets to the highest levels of government. Against a backdrop of continuing violence and danger, Lena comes to realise the most dangerous enemy can be searching for the truth.

Q: Why did you set the novel in 1987?

1987 was one of the most violent and politically charged years of the Troubles. The IRA and the SAS were killing each other while Westminster looked away, putting the legal system under enormous strain. The gap between official justice and what was actually happening on the ground in Belfast was devastating. It felt like the right moment in which to drop a character – someone who still believed the law should mean something.

Q: Lena Dawson comes from London. Is that significant?

Absolutely. Lena arrives with an outsider’s assumptions – that the courts are neutral, that the law is the law. Belfast in 1987 strips all of that away very quickly. Her London background is really a device for exploring what the conflict looked like for a person who arrived thinking they knew it all and how different reality was on the ground. It exposes the prejudice and wrongful assumptions then being made in Britain.

Q: Crossing Overis your debut novel. How did your background as an investigative journalist shape it?

I spent forty years reporting on the Troubles for the BBC, RTÉ, Reuters, and the Irish Press – sometimes at personal risk (I was warned more than once that I was on a loyalist death list). I spent time in homes, courtrooms and back streets on both side of ‘the divide’ that many people never saw. The novel draws on all of that. The legal detail, the political context, the way ordinary people were caught between paramilitaries and a state that sometimes colluded with those paramilitaries – none of that is invented. Fiction gave me the freedom to tell a truth that journalism sometimes could not.

Q: Your non-fiction book Lethal Alliesdocumented proven collusion between British forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Does Crossing Overexplore the same territory?

Lethal Allies dealt with documented, verified facts. Crossing Over is fiction – but fiction rooted in a similar reality. The conspiracy Lena uncovers in the novel reflects the kind of systemic corruption and cover-up that I know, from my investigative work, was real. Readers familiar with Lethal Allies will recognise the landscape.

Q: The book has been compared to Milkmanby Anna Burns and Trespassesby Louise Kennedy. How do you see it in that tradition?

Both Anna Burns and Louise Kennedy write about the North with enormous moral seriousness and authenticity. My book is different in some ways but I hope what connects them is a refusal to simplify – violence, love, moral compromise, dark humour. Belfast doesn’t lend itself to easy stories.

Q: There’s a romance at the heart of the novel. Was that always part of it?

Yes. I wanted the personal and the political to be genuinely entangled – not just as backdrop but as life really is, in my experience. Lena’s emotional life and her professional life clash and the outcome is inseparable from what’s happening around her. Love in a fractured world can throw up contradictions.

Q: What do you hope readers take from Crossing Over?

A sense of what it was actually like to live through that period in Belfast – the fear, the dark comedy, the drama, the moral challenges – even the grace that some people showed. And perhaps a recognition that truth, in that society, really was a dangerous thing to look for.

Crossing Over

Belfast, 1987. Lawyer, Lena thinks she understands justice, until she’s caught between loyalist paramilitaries, an IRA godfather, and a conspiracy reaching the highest levels. From journalist Anne Cadwallader, author of the landmark Lethal Allies, comes a propulsive debut novel where truth is the deadliest weapon.

ISBN: 9781917453608

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Crossing Over by Anne Cadwallader is published by Mercier Press. Anne Cadwallader is also the author of Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland (Mercier Press, 2013).