At the heart of Belfast Song are Nan Rose Murphy and Bridie Corr, childhood friends, who have been taken on as millies at a Belfast spinning mill when the story opens in 1911.
They come of age against a tempestuous background of a city and a country seething with conflict - as workers struggle for a living wage, as women organise for the right to vote, and as nationalists and unionists prepare to fight each other over Irish independence from England.
Then two shots in Sarajevo in 1914 spark a war across Europe and spin them, their families and their tight knit community off in directions they could never have imagined.
When those who survive the war return home, the women have to deal with the consequences of war on the men they love, and on themselves and their families.
Nan Rose narrates the story up until January 1914. Then, other voices join in through letters from Sheffield and the French WW1front, in voices as individual as fingerprints
