Can Lily O'Shea Come Out To Play?

This vivid memoir of a childhood in the 1930s and 1940s is marked by its narrator's consciousness of her status as an outsider, for Lily is the child of a mixed marriage, baptised as a Protestant but living in a Catholic community.

There have been other descriptions and narratives of Dublin tenement life, but the originality of this account of an Irish childhood is its portrait of a spirited girl coming to terms with her difference. At first she does not seem to understand why she cannot receive the blessing of the priests and nuns, which they convey somewhat haughtily upon her Catholic playmates. She yearns to be the same as other children: to have holy pictures and statues, altar lamps and a holy water font; to wear a lovely white communion dress.

At heart, however, this is a universal story of a childhood; of hardship and joy, violence, poverty, pleasure, humour and, over all, humanity.