IT'S hard to imagine how a story born out of a refugee camp dealing with oppression and cruelty could make a riveting page-turner, yet Baby Zero is just that. With this sort of subject matter you expect harrowing and thought-provoking, not humorous and action-packed. This is but one of the many contradictions its author, Emer Martin, manages to square.

Martin won Book of the Year at Listowel Writers' Week 11 years ago for her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon and she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship . . . previous recipients include Vladimir Nabokov and Phillip Roth . . . to work on Baby Zero so expectations are high.

The novel is set in Orap, a fictional country where each successive Talibanlike regime turns the year back to zero.

Martin has imagined a story not unlike Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections in its scope and depth. The family under the microscope here are the Fatagagases and it is with unflinching insight that we follow them as they struggle with political and cultural upheaval.

The story begins with a pregnant, Irish-born woman, Marguerite, imprisoned for standing up to the fundamentalist government in Orap. To retain her sanity she tells her unborn child the story of three baby zeros, all girls, born at times of change.

In the process, Marguerite's narrative uncovers unwelcome family secrets and takes us on a journey, via Orap, Los Angeles and Dublin, that describes what can happen when families become scattered across the globe against their wishes.

A compelling satire on the clash of civilisations, the success of this story lies in the telling.

In this novel, Martin has created credible characters, who are easy to empathise with, not least because her artist's eye rarely takes sides and isn't afraid to paint warts and all. Drawn in by the details, it's difficult not to care about what happens to these characters and how their stories end.

Painted in large letters on a wall in the centre of Dublin, someone has taken the trouble to proclaim, 'Never forgive, never forget' not too far away, another, in even larger letters reads, 'Love Life'. If these slogans represent the writing on the wall of a new, multicultural Ireland, then Emer Martin's Baby Zero, offers rare insight into what they might mean.