Belfast-born novelist Ronan Bennett knows a thing or two about political intrigue. When he was 18, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he was wrongly convicted for the murder of an RUC inspector and given a life sentence in the notorious prison at Long Kesh.

A year later, his conviction was overturned and he immigrated to England where, upon arrival, he was again arrested, this time on the catch-all anti-terrorist charge of conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown. After almost two years spent on remand at Her Majesty’s Prison Brixton, the charges were dropped and Bennett was freed.

His experiences with the vagaries of the British justice system informed his first novel, 1990’s The Second Prison , which finds a young Irish republican living a life very much like that of the young author. At the heart of this and subsequent novels is Bennett’s fascination with the plight of those unwillingly drawn into the vortex of political unrest. He treks similar ground in his fifth book-length fiction, the curiously titled Zugzwang .

Zugzwang is a chess term derived from the German words for move ( zug ) and compulsion ( zwang ). The word evokes that helpless circumstance in which a player finds himself obliged to make a move, even though it will leave him in an even worse position. In the case of the novel, the player who finds himself in zugzwang is Dr. Otto Spethmann, a respected psychoanalyst who ministers to the polite society of Tsarist St. Petersburg.