Frances Creighton: Found and Lost

Unable to cope with his English girlfriend’s death, Michael Roberts finds himself thinking back to another time and another place when he was in love for the first time. But that was when he was as a schoolboy in Belfast, at the start of The Troubles in the late 1960s, and in a culture dominated by divides that weren’t just sectarian. To his surprise and increasing torment, his memories-- long buried--prove elusive, so that struggling to remember what happened and why he had suppressed it becomes more and more of an obsession. Frances Creighton: Found and Lost is a deeply felt first novel that conveys the pain of late adolescence in a community where school and religion add more layers of cruelty to the under- lying instability of daily life and Northern Irish politics.

Kirby Porter grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, near the Harland and Wolff shipyard where one of his grandfathers and great-grandfathers helped build the Titanic between 1909-12. He studied Russian at Queen’s University Belfast and took further degrees at the University of London and the University of Wales. He became Head of Library Services for a North London borough, gave talks on Russian and Irish Poetry, and was an active trade unionist. Back in Belfast he created library services for both the Northern Ireland Civil Service and the Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as teaching courses in Information Management at the University of Ulster. He is now a grandfather and lives on the east coast of Scotland.