A WEST Belfast author is set to release her first book set in Belfast over one hundred years ago, with a backdrop of the events which have had a lasting impact on the city.
Mary Marken grew up on the Falls Road and was just a teenager when the Troubles broke out. She went on to work in youth work at home and in England.
'Belfast Song' is narrated by young women, Nan Rose Murphy and Bridie Corr, childhood friends, who have been taken on as millies at a Belfast spinning mill when the story opens in 1911.
They come of age against a tempestuous background of a city and a country seething with conflict – as workers struggle for a living wage, as women organise for the right to vote, and as nationalists and unionists prepare to fight each other over Irish independence from England.
Then two shots in Sarajevo in 1914 spark a war across Europe and spin them, their families and their tight-knit community off in directions they could never have imagined.
When those who survive return home, the women have to deal with the consequences of war on the men they love, and on themselves and their families.
Nan Rose narrates the story up until January 1914. Then, other voices join in through letters from Sheffield and the Western Front.
Speaking about the book, Mary explained: “I was sitting in Belfast Central Library sometime in the early 2010s and at the beginning of my research into Belfast in the 1910s, I came across a paper by Dr Margaret Ward on The Irish Women's Workers Union which she presented to the Irish Labour History Annual Conference in 1981.
"I read then that when James Connolly was a trade union organiser in Belfast, he became involved in helping women mill workers in a dispute with their employer.
"That inspired my imagination to create the opening chapters of Belfast Song.”
'Belfast Story' by Mary Marken will be released on August 28, priced £10. You can order here. Mary will also host a book launch on Friday, September 20 at 1pm in Conway Education Centre.
