Before My Actual Heart Breaks

When she was young Mary Rattigan wanted to fly. She was going to take off like an angel from heaven and leave the muck and madness of troubled Northern Ireland behind. Nothing but the Land of Happy Ever After would do for her. But as a Catholic girl with a B.I.T.C.H. for a Mammy and a silent Daddy, things did not go as she and Lizzie Magee had planned. Now, five children, twenty-five years, an end to the bombs and bullets, enough whisky to sink a ship and endless wakes and sandwich teas later, Mary's alone