No Bones

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2002 A stunning debut novel about a little girl growing up in Belfast, from the author of the Man Booker Prize winning novel, Milkman . ‘Marvellous: shocking, moving, evocative’ Daily Mail This is sensational. This young Irishwoman is perhaps the most distinctive, the most purely gifted new writer to come to Flamingo all year. Her debut novel tracks the tragicomic fortunes of the Lovett family of Catholic Belfast – splenetically violent father; shrewdly mad mother; malevolent Mick the eldest; and dreamy, endearing Amelia, our narrator of choice. Their antics over the years (she devotes, more or less, one chapter per year from 1969 to the late 1990s) – fights, school, kickings, the IRA and the RUC vying for Most Inept Police in the City, more violence – make for black comedy of the highest order. We are up amongst the gods here: think Belfast’s Angela’s Ashes; think Roddy Doyle with guns; think a Northern Irish Trainspotting.