There is a lot that is bleak in Stone Kingdoms. Naomi, raised in a vicarage overlooking the sea by her parents, she says, 'There should be some magic in growing up by the sea, but I never feel my life touched by it.' And yet the healing qualities of the sea return to her again and again. We first meet Naomi as an adult in a hospital bed, badly burnt and her eyes wrapped in bandages. The novel then takes us back to her childhood and the life choices that led to that time. From the coast of Donegal she moves to Belfast during The Troubles and takes a pupil under her wing who other teachers have written off. The young man disappoints her and she volunteers to work for a relief agency in an un-named African country where there is civil war and famine. The things she sees here are brutal and the novel does become bleak but there are pinpricks of love and goodness until the end. Naomi constantly reflects back on the young pupil, her father and an incident she experienced as a child with her mother. Her mother intervened when they encountered a group of men who were harrassing someone. These are the incidents that are important to Naomi and David Park bring the reader back to them again and again. The theme of civil war crops up again and again too. Well constructed and written, even if occasionally clumsy, this was a good but distressing read. ( )