Belfast Days: A 1972 Teenage Diary; Eimear O'Callaghan

Belfast 1972. It’s the bloodiest year of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ and sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Eimear O’Callaghan bears witness in her new diary. What follows is a unique and at times disturbing insight into the life of an ordinary teenager coming of age in extraordinary times. The immediacy of the diary entries is complemented by the author’s mature reflections upon rediscovering her journal forty years later. The result is poignant, shocking, wryly funny and, above all, explicitly honest. As Northern Ireland continues to be haunted by the legacy of its turbulent past, Belfast Days demonstrates how one person’s examination of her own ‘story’ gave her a new perspective on one of the darkest periods in twentieth-century British and Irish history.