Navigation

The Troubles With Us

Availability: Out of Stock
ISBN: 9780008393717
AuthorO'Neill, Alix
Pub Date24/06/2021
BindingTrade PB
CountryIRL
Dewey941.6082
Publisher: Harper Collins
Quick overview A hilarious memoir about growing up in Northern Ireland in the 90s towards the end of the Troubles and a brilliantly propelling narrative of the extraordinary background story of her mother.
€15.14

Her mother's vivid personality and witty colloquialisms dominate the book and help to give a social history of life in Belfast from the 1950s onwards.Growing up on the Falls Road in 1990s Belfast, Alix O'Neill has seen it all - burnt-out buses blocking the route to school, the police mistaking her father for a leading terrorist and a classmate playing hide and seek with her dad's prosthetic hand (blown off making a device for the IRA). Not that she or her friends are up-to-speed with the goings-on of the resistance.

They're too preoccupied with the obsessions of every teenage girl - booze, boys and Boyzone - to worry about the violence on their doorstep. Besides, the odd coffee jar bomb is nothing compared to the drama about to explode in Alix's personal life. Desperate to leave Northern Ireland and the trials of her mother's unorthodox family - a loving yet eccentric band of misfits - behind, she makes grand plans for the next stage.

But it's through these relationships and their gradual unravelling that Alix begins to appreciate not only the troubled history of where she comes from, but the strength of its women. Warm, embarrassing, and full of love and insight, The Troubles With Us is a hilarious and moving account of the madness and mundanities of life in Northern Ireland during the 30-year conflict. It's a story of mothers and daughters, the fallout from things left unsaid and the lengths a girl will go to for fake tan.

*
*
*
Product description

Her mother's vivid personality and witty colloquialisms dominate the book and help to give a social history of life in Belfast from the 1950s onwards.Growing up on the Falls Road in 1990s Belfast, Alix O'Neill has seen it all - burnt-out buses blocking the route to school, the police mistaking her father for a leading terrorist and a classmate playing hide and seek with her dad's prosthetic hand (blown off making a device for the IRA). Not that she or her friends are up-to-speed with the goings-on of the resistance.

They're too preoccupied with the obsessions of every teenage girl - booze, boys and Boyzone - to worry about the violence on their doorstep. Besides, the odd coffee jar bomb is nothing compared to the drama about to explode in Alix's personal life. Desperate to leave Northern Ireland and the trials of her mother's unorthodox family - a loving yet eccentric band of misfits - behind, she makes grand plans for the next stage.

But it's through these relationships and their gradual unravelling that Alix begins to appreciate not only the troubled history of where she comes from, but the strength of its women. Warm, embarrassing, and full of love and insight, The Troubles With Us is a hilarious and moving account of the madness and mundanities of life in Northern Ireland during the 30-year conflict. It's a story of mothers and daughters, the fallout from things left unsaid and the lengths a girl will go to for fake tan.

Customers who bought this item also bought

The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices

McVeigh, Paul
9781800180246
Sixteen established authors - including Kevin Barry, Roddy Doyle, Lisa McInerney and Lyra McKee - and sixteen new voices write on their experience of being working-class in Ireland
€11.68

Someone Has to Die for This Dublin : November 1920 -July 1921

Molyneux, Derek
9781781177556
Hot on the heels of Killing at its Very Extreme, Dublin: October 1917 - November 1920, Someone Has to Die for This, Dublin: November 1920 - July 1921 wrenches the reader into of the final frenetic months of Dublin's War of Independence, in uncompromising, unflinching, and unprecedented detail.
€19.76

The Wildflowers of Ireland: A Field Guide

Devlin, Zoe
9780717191871
New and updated edition of Ireland's bestselling wildflower guide.
€16.99