The novel is set in Ireland in the era of political upheaval between the 1916 Easter Rising and the eventual truce signed with the United Kingdom in 1921, seen through the eyes of young Henry Smart, from his childhood to early twenties.

Henry, as a member of the Irish Citizen Army, becomes personally acquainted with several historical characters, including Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Michael Collins.

One cover to "A Star Called Henry" features a young member of the Irish Republican Army on patrol.

[1] While Doyle had addressed issues in his previous novels that indicated his revisionist and atheist perspective on Irish history before, in A Star Called Henry he tackled these ideas at a far more ambitious scale.

[6] In The Guardian, Roy Foster notes "The novel's greatest triumph is to recreate this world in Doyle's distinctive shorthand, without any creaky historical set pieces, and make it utterly convincing".

Reviewers with a penchant for Irish literature and history tended to rate it positively, while critics without this specialist knowledge sometimes rejected the novel.