Meet Will Patterson. He’s an apprentice at an aircraft factory in Belfast. He gets the same bus in the morning as Liz McCutcheon – beautiful, graceful and pain in the chest achingly unreachable Liz McCutcheon. Until that is, one morning she drops her hankie for Will to pick up …

And Liz’s brother Nathan, Goat Wrestler extraordinaire, whose skills in bringing down Gertie the Goat are applauded from far and wide as invisible crowds of thrilled onlookers roar their approval. But who will tire of the game first – Gertie or the quickly maturing and thoughtful Nathan?

Then there’s William Mungo Kirkpatrick, aided and abetted by walking disasters, Lennie and Bisto. Kirkie has often toyed with the idea of submarines – two old steel baths welded together, an electric motor with a car battery for power and a periscope. It couldn’t fail, could it?

A debut novel from Ballywalter author Ivan McKeown and the first in the Ballydoonan series, Hesitant Hearts and the Wrestling of Goats takes the reader on a series of witty discoveries, each one brimming with good humour, tinged with pathos, but ever on the brink of momentous disaster.

Ivan Mc Keown’s fiction celebrates that carefree blithe spirit that is not dead yet though perhaps teetering just a little on the edges of modern technology and globalism. Humour and humanity live here in a real, exciting, experimental world of possibilities. This is also very much a portrait to remember of people we loved in places we knew.