LURGAN CHAMPAGNE AND OTHER TALES
Real-life stories from Northern Ireland
edited by Kate Fearon and Amanda Verlaque
£4.99
'Growing up here ... nah, meant nothing really. We did what every other teenager did, male or female, Irish or British, or American, or Australian - we smoked one cigarette between the six of us, drank cider, snogged people and hung around on street corners.'
Lurgan Champagne is all about familiar teenage issues - bullying, peer pressure, family problems, sexuality, body image, boyfriends - but it also shows how these fairly 'ordinary' concerns can be affected by living in an area of conflict. A group of teenagers drinking in the park trip over a soldier hiding in the bushes; one contributor describes how she can't go out to meet her friends because there's a sniper hanging out in the back garden...'Like everywhere else, normality is what you grow up with. Like seeing soldiers in my back yard was normal'. This book is an eye-opener about a conflict that is little understood. It's about real life and real people in an area where difficulties are met with humour, optimism and a good dose of wit.
Kate Fearon
is political adviser to the Northern Irish Women's Coalition and has been co-director of the political think-tank, Democratic Dialogue. She is the editor of Power, Politics, Positionings: Women in Northern Ireland and Politics: The Next Generation.
Amanda Verlaque
has been a journalist for six years and has written for newspapers and magazines both north and south of the Irish border. She is presently concentrating on script-reading and working as a freelance unit publicist in Northern Ireland's growing film industry.