Meeting Point by Lucy Caldwell

Belfast-born Caldwell’s first novel, Where They Were Missed, was set against the background of the Troubles that changed people’s lives in unaccountable ways. In The Meeting Point, the focus is also on the places and people that affect our ‘faith and identity’.

She is a playwright as well as a novelist, so it is not surprising she has a strong ear for voice. When They Were Missed is told through the eyes of a six-year-old girl; in The Meeting Point we meet two very different women thrown together in an alien world. Ruth, who has lived all her life on an isolated farm, is filled with “the joy of the Holy Spirit” when she and their little daughter accompany her new missionary husband to Bahrain, where he will “preach the good news”. No sooner do they land than she discovers an unsettling truth about his mission. Stranded in her bleak, guarded compound she meets Noor, a disturbed, friendless teenager who has left her English mother to live with her Arab father. Ruth falls for Noor’s attractive young Arab cousin, Farid and Noor babysits while they go out together. Meanwhile Noor confides to her diary her growing attachment to the warm English family that seems to bring the friendship and love she longs for. The squalor, colour and repression of Bahrain influence the actions and feelings of the characters. When Farid takes Ruth to the original Tree of Life in the supposed Garden of Eden her prayers for a moment of revelation are shattered by this sordid spot and she undergoes a fall from grace. For Caldwell, writing “can be redemptive and inspirational”. Like Waugh and Green before her she explores doubt, temptation and the search for “something to believe in”.