Troubles with Us: One Belfast Girl on Boys, Bombs and Finding Her Way

Derry Girls meets David Sedaris Elske Rahill The writing is full of energy and originality Irish Times 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. Theyre 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 Alixs personal life.  Desperate to leave Northern Ireland and the trials of her mothers unorthodox family a loving yet eccentric band of misfits behind, she makes grand plans for the next stage. But its 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 thirty-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.