Burning Your Own

It is the summer of 1969 and ten-year-old Mal is finding it difficult to settle in to 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.

“The smells of the food they had been eating hung heavily in the kitchen and dinette, so that they, too, seemed swollen and gorged. Mrs Martin opened the kitchen door like you would a notch on a belt. The television was on in the living room and, in exchange for the smell of fried cabbage, a newscaster’s voice drifted through, telling them about the trouble. Rioting had gone on throughout Sunday and into the early hours of that day; it had been worst around the Unity Flats complex, at the junction of Peter’s Hill and Upper Library Street, and in the Ardoyne area, north of the city. The newscaster had a pleasant, consoling sort of voice, even when talking about violence; polite too.”

Glenn Patterson, Burning Your Own, (Blackstaff Press, 2008) reproduced by permission of Blackstaff Press.

As in other novels, Patterson focuses on the moment before the Troubles erupted to remind us of a society that was more innocent and unknowing and to illustrate the damage done to simple eager hopes.