This British and Irish bronze age is my specialty; I have been studying it for 30 years. Over this time, I have found less than 12 novels actually set in this period...and many of them were pretty dreadful, poorly researched, with either fluffy ideas or else giving our ancestors some kind of mystic powers, as if they were too stupid to advance their own civilisation by building great structures such as Newgrange or Stonehenge and needed some kind of outside help.
This is one of the better novels on the subject.
It has some flaws, such as jerky scene transitions, and in my opinion the neolithic natives are a bit too 'fluffy bunny' (ie peaceful, in tune with the earth happy hippy types--in fact, there is plenty of evidence of neolithic warfare, at least as much as in the bronze age,despite the more martial appearance of the later beaker folk.)
However, despite this, and some jarring modern turns of phrase such as 'yer man' and 'banjaxed' (I think the author was trying to show that the incoming bronze age people were the 'celts' and hence gave them Irish turns of phrase, but these are such modern expressions, it really didn't work.
The parts regarding use of trade routes between Ireland and the Atlantic coast were very good and up to date archaeologically; the copper smelting bit was excellent.
A bit more editing,perhaps one more draft for flow and a little less of the 'wise noble savage'ideology, and it would have been a very good book on this neglected era of prehistory.
