Before My Actual Heart Breaks

WINNER OF THE AUTHORS'' CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD
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''Fresh, entertaining, funny and moving'' RODDY DOYLE

''A touching tale of how one woman survives a tough beginning to eventually end up exactly where her heart belongs'' ANNE GRIFFIN, author of When All is Said
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''If I could go back to being sixteen again, I''d do things differently.''
''Everyone over the age of forty feels like that, you total gom,'' says my best friend Lizzie Magee.

When she was young Mary Rattigan wanted to fly. She was going to take off like an angel from heaven and leave the muck and madness of troubled Northern Ireland behind. Nothing but the Land of Happy Ever After would do for her.

But as a Catholic girl with a B.I.T.C.H. for a Mammy and a silent Daddy, things did not go as she and Lizzie Magee had planned.

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