The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens (Atlantic Books, 460pp, £25) declares itself “the epic story of the Indian Wars for the American West”. Nothing, though, can quite prepare you for seeing the whole catastrophe unfold – campaign by campaign, treaty by broken treaty, battle by gruesome battle – over the course of 460 pages. Whatever faint chance there was that two civilisations so far apart in their aims and means could have found a modus vivendi was crushed again and again by cruelty, greed, double-crossing and bad faith. The flashes of good intentions, mutual admiration and friendship that broke out between the combatants serve only to heighten the tragedy of the denouement. Cozzens provides a masterful account of what is, I should add, not a simple tale of good and evil. The Indian tribes had been bullying one another about the plains before the whites arrived. Hatreds ran deep, treachery abounded and vengeance was brutal. But the next bully on the scene came with countless numbers and had the power to eat up all the space that must once have seemed so endless. In the words cried out by White Bull as he led a charge at Little Bighorn: “Only heaven and earth last long.” As the title suggests, The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting (MacLehose Press, 480pp, £17) concerns another of the greatest bloodlettings in history. The story opens, however, in an obscure corner of modern-day Norway. The protagonist, Edvard, farms alongside his grandfather, who has reared him since both his parents died when visiting the Great War battlefield. It is an event shrouded in mystery: why did they go there? How exactly did they die? Sixteen Trees answers these questions all in its own time and in its own way. The answers are not straightforward – one might almost say contrived – but the tug of this book on the heart and mind is irresistible. There is a subtle religious undercurrent to the whole thing. And you will, I think, struggle to find a modern novel in which the emotional, imaginative lure of trees and wood is as powerful. And finally a word for something very different, though also steeped in an appalling episode from history. Jim McDowell is a journalist who worked in his native Belfast throughout the Troubles, seeing the very worst of it up close. It was personal as well – a colleague assassinated by the Loyalist Volunteer Force; a terrible beating inflicted by the UVF; countless death threats against himself and his family. Proud of his home city and of his roots in the Protestant working class, McDowell is ecumenical in his disgust at the paramilitaries and gangsters who have disfigured Northern Ireland and caused so much pain. He is an inveterate storyteller, but don’t come to The Good Fight (Gill, 368pp, £14) expecting an elegantly crafted memoir. This is a tale told by an old-school hack – rough around the edges, gripping at its core. It opens, by the way, with a poignant anecdote about waking one morning in a Dublin hotel to the sound of the Angelus on the radio – “a thing of beauty” – all too quickly followed by the descent into horror on Ulster’s country lanes.