Darran Anderson’s granular memoir of the Troubles

Inventory. By Darran Anderson.Chatto & Windus; 416 pages; £16.99. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August; $27. 

THE TITLE of Darran Anderson’s new book comes from Georges Perec, an experimental French writer of the mid-20th century. Perec urged other authors to describe—to inventorise—the streets and objects around them. Mr Anderson follows this advice rigorously, rendering a finely textured account of his upbringing in a city that Catholics called Derry and many Protestants knew as Londonderry. In the 1980s and 1990s, amid the fear and violence of the Troubles, every detail was telling.

The telephone, for example, was more than an everyday communication device. It was used by paramilitaries to issue warnings of bombings or to claim responsibility for attacks and murders. As Mr Anderson puts it, it was a means to “give ideological justification for why a child might no longer have a parent or a parent might no longer have a child”.

His own (Catholic) family were stalwarts of the city. His grandfather was a smuggler who knew every sandbank and cove of the Foyle, a river that runs through Derry-Londonderry and along the Irish border. His father was a gravedigger and gardener, who in his youth had been caught up in the Troubles and imprisoned, though...