Burning Your Own: A coming-of-age novel by one of the best contemporary Irish writers

It is the summer of 1969 and ten-year-old Mal is finding it difficult to settle into his new home, a housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast. He befriends a brash and rebellious teenager, Francy, who revels in his own status as an outsider and has set up camp in the local dump.

But this is no ordinary summer – the civil rights marches are beginning, and the simmering sectarian tensions of the Larkview estate are set to erupt, hastening Mal’s painful, shocking loss of innocence.

A criti...