Martin Malone was so concerned that all Muslims were being portrayed as dangerous fundamentalists that the recently retired UN peacekeeper sat down and wrote a novel.

The veteran of Irish UN missions to Lebanon and Iraq has written his third book from the viewpoint of a Shia Muslim who is a liberal with a tortured conscience.

And his story of a Lebanese man grappling with the fact that he witnessed a crime committed against an Irish soldier has landed the soft-spoken, modest Kildare man in the company of literary giants such as Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee.

Malone's Broken Cedar has been nominated for The International IMPACT Dublin Literary Award alongside globally renowned writers like Anita Brookner and Gunter Grass.

At home in Kildare, the 47-year-old, who survived being shot at and shelled from all sides in Lebanon's wars, explained why he wanted to write the book from the perspective of a Lebanese Muslim.

'I did five tours of duty in Lebanon with the UN so I got to know the people out there,' he said. 'In recent years Muslims have been equated with fundamentalism and violence, which is a totally unfair misrepresentation. I have tried to show a man who is liberal and who wrestles with his conscience, a fully rounded, complex human being.'

Having served as a military policeman investigating crime and corruption in a UN peacekeeping mission, Malone includes a detective/crime theme in his novel.

'The basic plot is that this man who I've called Khalil Abbas is at the end of his life and starts to come to terms with a crime he witnessed many years before. It is set in 1994 when a young Irish soldier comes over to Lebanon and investigates the abduction and murder of his father by a Muslim faction many years before. The main character actually witnessed the incident but for years kept quiet about it. So the thrust of the novel is this man at the end of his life who is trying to put things right,' Malone said.

The central character, Malone explained, was an amalgam of various Lebanese men he encountered on Mingy Street, a strip of shops running alongside the United Nations Forces in Lebanon (Unifil) headquarters at Naqura, close to the Israeli border.

Mingy Street was an arcade of the sacred and the profane with Lebanese traders selling gold, silver, designer watches, clothes, alcohol and porn to blue berets from Unifil.

The narrow strip of shops running parallel to the Unifil headquarters at Naqura close to the Lebanese/Israeli border is the setting for much of the action in Malone's novel.

The ex-MP, however, rejects any attempt to draw parallels between his tale of soldiering with the macho-militarism of novels such as Bravo Two Zero .

'Broken Cedar is as much a psychological thriller as a crime or mystery novel,' he said. 'It probes into the mind of a man who harbours a guilty secret, an innocent who witnessed something terrible done to an Irish peacekeeper and who now has to confront that past.'

Malone's previous book After Kafra also dealt with the legacy of the past in Lebanon. His main protagonist, an Irish UN vet, suffers from post-traumatic disorder the source of which is traced through flashbacks to a violent incident in southern Lebanon.

'What amazes me is that the Irish Defence Forces have been sending troops out to Lebanon since 1978 for peacekeeping duties and there have been hardly any books about it. Thousands of men and women have served out there, yet there is only a tiny amount of literature about the Irish experience out there and its impact afterwards,' he said.

Asked about sharing the same list as literary figures like Amis or Grass, Malone added: 'It's very flattering of course, and I have to say I was stunned when the news came through.'

Apart from Malone's two novels there has been only one, non-fiction, book about the Irish battalion's 25-year history of service to Unifil. More than 40 soldiers were killed in southern Lebanon while on active duty.

Two other Irish novels, Colin McCann's Dancer and Gerard Donovan's Schopenhauer's Telescope have also been long-listed for the €100,000 literary prize.