OLD photographs can be powerful things. So powerful that Fiona Shaw has managed to spin an entire book out of one.

It's a simple enough photograph: a black and white image taken in a low-ceilinged cellar. Trestles support a stretcher, and on the stretcher lies a wounded man - a First World War officer. Beside him stands another officer, feeding the wounded man a cigarette. A nurse dressed in breeches, boots and a man's overcoat stands to one side.

Daniel Brown, the hero of York author Fiona's second novel The Picture She Took, glimpses the photograph at an exhibition. It is a few years after the war's end. Daniel, a man haunted by his own wartime experiences, recognises one of the men in the picture - and is drawn into a long journey of discovery and of redemption.

He travels north to Yorkshire to find the person who took the photograph and meets Jude - a young woman who found herself liberated by her work as a wartime nurse but now feels smothered by the stifling reality of a woman's life in the early 1920s.

The Picture She Took begins at a gentle, almost sombre pace. Daniel is a young man who finds it difficult to live with himself - scarred by the memories of the awful things he did in the name of his country.

Not fighting in Europe - he was too young to see action of the battlefields of Belgium - but when supposedly 'keeping the peace' with the Black and Tans in Ireland after the war was over.

"The idea that I began with was: what is it like if you're a soldier who has found yourself doing things - terrible things - you never would have believed you could do?" Fiona says. "He's not a psychopath. He's an ordinary man who has done these terrible things. Torching houses: arresting men and sending them to Dublin where he knows they will be interrogated and tortured."

Daniel is first seen through the eyes of a young girl selling tickets to the exhibition at which he sees the photograph. He walks with a limp, the result of an injury. "He was a nice height, not too thin like lots were. Plenty of hair, ordinary colour, somewhere between brown and fair. And well-dressed. Bespoke suit, not a thirty-shilling number. He didn't smile."

That last bit is important: Daniel has forgotten how to smile. Slowly, carefully, like an artist at an easel, Fiona builds up a picture of this damaged, guilt-wracked man - a man haunted by nightmares of his elder brother Johnnie, killed in the war, and of the awful atrocities he himself took part in in Ireland.

In one devastating flashback scene, Fiona describes Daniel's mother, numbed with shock at having been told just two days before that Johnnie had been killed, standing at the kitchen table and unseeingly opening the day's post.

Out of one envelope flutters a letter. A young Daniel picks it up and hands it to her. "It's from Johnnie," he says. "Isn't that funny? He's dead for two days and here he is, alive again."

Jude's war as a young nurse on the Western front was very different. She cares for the young men whose bodies were shattered by war - and also takes photos of them, trying to capture the intimacy, mercy and kindness shared among those forced together in pain and hardship.

"The death and suffering was terrible," Fiona says. "But otherwise for her she was really alive. She comes back after the war and all that freedom, all that sense of independence, goes."

The first meeting between the novel's two main characters is beautifully captured.

Jude is seen first through Daniel's eyes, her white hands - they're covered with flour from baking bread - raised so as not to get dust everywhere.

We then get a view of Daniel through her eyes - young, tall, slightly built and uncertain, half-turned away from the door in disappointment because he thinks the person he is looking for is not in.

His limp, she notices, doesn't suit him. "It looked like something he was still reluctant to give way to."

What follows is a beautiful, understated love story - one which, as the two search together to solve the mystery of the photo Jude took, develops almost into a literary detective story.

She's been told by several people that the pace of the novel changes half way through, Fiona admits.

"I love reading detective novels," she says. "I've never been able to plot them, but in a sense, that's what this novel becomes - almost a kind of quest."

The Picture She Took is published by Virago at £15.99. Fiona will be at Borders in York at 7.30pm on Thursday to talk about her book.

Updated: 11:36 Saturday, June 18, 2005