Felicity McCall
Finding Lauren

Finding Lauren is Derry-based writer Felicity McCall’s second novel for Guildhall Press.

Her first, Reckoning (2006) was reviewed in Verbal as a compulsive page-turner and Finding Lauren, too, immediately engages the reader with the strong characterisation and keen ear for dialogue one would expect from a writer with awards for screenplay and scriptwriting.

Finding Lauren is set in 2005 but the action is played out against the violent backdrop of the Northern Ireland of the 1970s and 80s.

It opens in County Antrim in the home of the central character, seventy nine-year old widow Regina Monteith, who has long since buried her adored only son, William. We meet her as she is prepares to endure the eightieth birthday celebrations planned by her neighbour and home help, Betty.

Regina must ensure two things before she surrenders to the cancer which is slowly killing her - that the surprising fortune she has amassed over the years is passed on according to her wishes, and that the family secret, which could threaten this - the existence of William’s illegitimate daughter- goes with her to the grave.

Across the county, her estranged brother’s daughter, Cordelia Harcourt, begins the task of sorting out her dead parents’ papers, and stumbles upon confirmation that William had fathered a child to a singer, more than thirty years ago, when he was starting his career in the RUC. The existence of the child, or her mother, had never been acknowledged.

Driven by an inherited sense of righting a perceived injustice, Cordelia takes an emotionally painful journey through her own past and enlists the help of an old college friend of the lover who irrevocably changed her own life. The friend, David, himself a survivor of loss and violence, is now working as a provincial journalist in the area where her search is concentrated.

Aware of what Cordelia is doing, and with time running out for them all, Regina sets about further rewriting the past with the help of Betty who is now as dependent on alcohol and her married policeman lover as she once was desperate for the affection of a man like William. Slowly, Betty realises this could be a blackmail opportunity to change her life- if only she can be clever enough to play a double game, by convincing Regina that correspondence she has instigated is the work of Cordelia.

Told partly in flashbacks to the late 1960s,the search for Lauren takes them all through the archives of some of the bloodiest and most controversial days in the history of the north.

It will prove a journey in which all the participants learn more about themselves than they do about their quarry.

When they eventually track down Lauren and establish her parentage, they find that the idealistic, ill-fated lovers of Cordelia’s imagination must be supplanted by a relationship which is a metaphor for all that was brutal, shameful and needlessly lost in a troubled era of Ireland’s social history.

To order Finding Lauren for home delivery click the jacket above.

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