Description
‘Derry Girls meets David Sedaris’ Elske Rahill, author of An Unravelling’The writing is full of energy and originality’ Irish TimesGrowing 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. 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. 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 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.
About the Author
Alix O’Neill is a freelance journalist, who has written for Marie Claire, The Times, the Sunday Times, Guardian, Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Stella, Red, Grazia, The Spectator and The Pool. She has appeared as a broadcast commentator and newspaper reviewer on Sky News, as well as Good Morning Britain, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, LBC Radio, Radio London and TalkRadio’s Badass Woman’s Hour. In 2019, she had a regular online column for Red on her family’s search for the good life abroad. Alix lives in Southwest France with her husband and two young sons. The Troubles with Us is her first book.
