Brigid Carrick

Brigid was born in Dublin, where she trained and worked as a midwife. She emigrated to Australia in 1969, where she met and married her husband and raised two daughters. Brigid worked as a midwife, teacher and after-hours manager at the Royal Women’s and the Royal Melbourne Hospitals, until she retired in 2018. While Brigid has published numerous short stories, The Belfast Express is her first novel.

Brianna Robinson is eighteen and determined to be a nurse. She secretly travels from her home in Dublin to London for an interview to train in a major hospital. It is the early 1970s and Brianna’s mother fears her daughter will lose her Catholicism in London.

Why doesn’t Brianna simply do what her two older sisters have done and work in a Dublin office where Mr Right might be waiting? Brianna’s ambition soon becomes a problem for her family and all their nosey neighbours, one of whom calls their local priest for a divinely awkward intervention.

As the Troubles in Northern Ireland go from bad to worse, Brianna’s quest forges new friendships while a wolf lurks in the background. Amid the heady fashions and music of the time, this is one young woman’s story of liberation through a bizarre and colourful defiance of the Church and Irish law.

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