The Traveller families who live in Saint Rita’s are on borrowed time. In just a week they will be evicted by the local council, threatening not only their homes but also their history and the stories that have shaped them.
Charlene, a proud young beoir suffers a humiliating betrayal. Her mother, Kate, is left to navigate unbearable loss while holding the family together. Her cousin, Sheena, strives to find her place in a new environment that is quick to dismiss her. Her uncle Tommy fights despair as his teenage son spirals out of control.
As eviction day draws closer, the families struggle to preserve their dignity finding strength in one another as they navigate an unknown future.
Unflinching, Contentious Spaces is a haunting story about identity and loyalty, shame and resilience, grief and love, and the defiant power of voices that refuse to be silenced.
ISBN 9781915017130
'The home scar - that's what they call the mark limpets make on the rock when they return.'
'Wait, they leave the rock?'
'Of course. How else would they survive?'
On opposite sides of the world, half-siblings Cassie and Christo have built their lives around work, intent on ignoring their painful past. When a dramatic storm in Galway hits the headlines, they're drawn back there to revisit a glorious childhood summer, the last before their mother died. But their journey uncovers memories of a far less happy summer - one that had tragic consequences. Confronted with the havoc their mother left in her wake, Cassie and Christo are forced to face their past and - ready or not - to deal with the messy tangle of parental love and neglect that shaped them.
The Home Scar is a luminous and precise story about the inheritance of loss and the possibility of finally making peace with it.
'Kathleen MacMahon's subject is memory itself: how we remember - and the impact upon our future lives when our memories deceive us. Compassionate and poignant, The Home Scar is a work of considerable moral power' Neil Hegarty.