"Troubles" tells the comic yet melancholy tale of an Englishman, Major Brendan Archer, who in 1919 goes to County Wexford in Ireland to reunite with his fiancée, Angela Spencer. From the crumbling Majestic Hotel at Kilnalough, he watches Ireland's fight for independence from Britain. Farrell started writing the book while on a Harkness Fellowship in the United States and finished it in a flat in Knightsbridge, London. He got the idea for the setting from going to Block Island and seeing the remains of an old burned-down hotel. He won a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for the novel, and with the prize money travelled to India to research his next novel.