Angela Koenig deals with serious matters in her beautifully written debut novel, Rebellion in Ulster. In the Eighties when Margaret Thatcher ruled Northern Ireland from London, Geraldine (“Jeri”) O’Donnell, an Irish-American lesbian Rhodes scholar at Oxford finds herself held without being charged in a Northern Ireland prison for women.

The authorities suspect she might be a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, due to the attempt of her Irish cousin, Fiona, and the cousin’s boyfriend to use the car Jeri had rented for a sight-seeing drive to smuggle explosives into Northern Ireland. Fiona hadn’t informed Jeri that the boyfriend secreted the explosives in the car. But if Jeri had known, would she have consented to the smuggling attempt, which ended with the shooting deaths of Fiona and her friend and Jeri’s imprisonment?

The two leaders of the IRA women prisoners attempt to recruit Jeri. They impose their own authority in the prison, in one case brutally punishing a bully prisoner for attempting to maim Jeri. A mysterious older woman, Arkadia O’Malley, who becomes Jeri’s best friend but refuses to be her lover, believes Jeri, an American, has no reason to involve herself in Northern Ireland’s “troubles.” Eventually, though, Jeri, resenting her mistreatment by the British and wishing to give some meaning to her cousin’s death, does join the IRA and soon becomes a valuable asset.

I greatly admire Koenig’s courageous portrayal of Jeri, during her three years in prison and after her sudden release, as intelligent, physically attractive, South Boston tough—and tragically conflicted. In all her assignments Jeri questions what the IRA leaders ask her to do. She’s especially reluctant to cause death or serious injury to those on either side who are caught up in the violent struggle but are otherwise innocent. One person’s remark that “good people always die in a war” fails to answer her questions—as it would my own.

Koenig wisely and vividly depicts all her characters as individuals. They don’t exist merely to advance her plot, which itself is a page-turning wonder, but to add complexity and reality in a world where no simple answers exist.

From the beginning to the end of this novel, Koenig’s writing is exquisite: “Her hair smelled like candlelight and rain, like parchment and cloves.” “She longed to be a strong sword flashing in sunlight, not a stealthy dagger striking in the night.” “A vision of a net that pulsed with currents of light . . . matched the world point for point. Everyone lived at a knotting that fixed one in time and place, yet one place was connected to all other places and nothing was separate.”

And consider this: “She wasn’t innocent. Explanation there might be, but all that mattered was that if she hadn’t brought the bomb, people who were now dead would be alive.”

I’ll never forget the story Angela Koenig told me in Rebellion in Ulster. ( )