Factory Girls: A bold snapshot of working young women during the tumultuous Troubles
Michelle Gallen
Formats & Editions
'The perfect pick for those missing their dose of Derry Girls' Irish Examiner
'Entertaining, touching and savagely funny' Sunday Times
'Vital, bang-on, and seriously funny' Roddy Doyle
It's the summer of 1994, and all Maeve Murray wants is some money and good exam results so she can escape her shitty wee town in Northern Ireland.
Over the holidays, Maeve bags herself a job at the local shirt factory with her best friends Caroline and Aoife. It's set to be the summer of their lives, but first she's got to survive a tit-for-tat paramilitary campaign as brutal as her relationship with her mam, iron 800 shirts a day to keep her job and dodge the attentions of Handy Andy Strawbridge, her slimy English boss. And when she starts to notice things aren't adding up at the factory, it seems like revealing the truth may just be her one-way ticket out of town.
WINNER OF THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE
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Praise for Factory Girls
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Full of the stuff that we're starting to expect of Michelle Gallen; wild, hilariously angry characters, and language that is vital, bang-on, and seriously funny - Roddy DoyleHighly entertaining . . . crackles with good one-liners . . . yet this earthy comedy also has telling things to say about violence and division - Independent, Books of the MonthA cracking follow-up - at times savagely funny, but with a loamy undertow of complex feeling . . . Fans of the contemporary Irish authors Lisa McInerney and Louise Kennedy should enjoy it too. - Sunday Times, best popular fiction books of 2022Original and compelling . . . Gallen's comic, insightful novel . . . shares brilliantly the tangled stories of young women in a struggling provincial town . . . Factory Girls brings a hidden generation of young women to the literary stage, and does so in a flurry of "thons" and "skitters". - Irish TimesIf the cast of Derry Girls worked in a shirtmaking factory . . . There's a lot of laugh-out-loud humour . . . but at its heart it's an emotional read - Belfast TelegraphGallen's pen draws blood with the sharpness of her observations, rendering a fresh and acutely more complex portrait of Northern Ireland through Maeve's eyes . . . Brilliantly, wickedly funny and soul-crushingly sad, Gallen has written the Vienetta of books this summer - Irish IndependentDarkly comic - Daily MailOne of the most entertaining, engagingly written summer reads you will lay your hands on - Sunday Life Magazine
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