Kirby Porter - Frances Creighton: Found and Lost

Kirby Porter - Frances Creighton: Found and Lost  

4⭐

Genre: Fiction, Irish Literature, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance  

Pages: 204 

Format: Paperback 

Publisher:  Envelope Books 

Date Published: 4th November 2021

Huge thank you to Evenlope Books for sending me this book to read and review.

 

Book Blurb: 

Unable to cope with the death of his girlfriend, Londoner Michael Roberts tries to find comfort in memories of another time and another place when he was in love for the first time.

 

But that first time was as a schoolboy in Belfast, at the start of The Troubles in the late 1960s, and in a culture dominated by divides that weren’t just sectarian.

 

To his surprise and increasing anguish his memories—long buried—prove elusive, so that finding out what had really happened and why it got suppressed becomes more and more of an obsession.

 

As Michael gradually uncovers forgotten truths he starts to learn something that challenges everything he ever knew about himself and the person he has become. 

 

Frances Creighton: Found and Lost is a deeply felt first novel that conveys the pain of late adolescence in a community where school and religion add more layers of cruelty to the underlying instability of daily life and Northern Irish politics.

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My Review: 

Very beautifully written book about someone who is trying to come to terms with grief, whilst exploring his own pasts and life choices. It is a very short book, that I devoured in a couple of hours.

The book follows Michael as she learns that his girlfriend has passed away. His grief takes him to his past, especially his youth and his first love a girl called Frances. He can’t stop thinking about where Frances might be now, and he takes the reader through his complicated love story with Frances where he had to choose either her or his family. This book looks deeper than just Michael's love story. It explores reasons why Michael is the way he is. It looks at Belfast in the light of The Troubles. It also explores Michael's guilt about what happened with both girls he loved.

Overall: Although being a very short story, this book packs in so much. It definitely made me so invested and interested from page 1. It does play on your heartstrings and makes you think deeper about our culture and upbringing and how it all affects our choices and us later in life. Another amazing release by Envelope Books that I can’t recommend enough! 

About the Author

Kirby Porter grew up in Belfast near the Harland and Wolff shipyard where a grandfather and a great- grandfather helped build the Titanic between 1909–12. He studied Russian at Queen’s University Belfast and took further degrees at the University of London and the University of Wales. He became Head of Library Services for a North London borough, gave talks on Russian and Irish Poetry, and was an active trade unionist. Back in Belfast he created library services for both the Northern Ireland Civil Service and the Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as teaching courses in Information Management at the University of Ulster. He is now a grandfather and lives on the east coast of Scotland.

https://www.envelopebooks.co.uk/frances-creighton-found-and-lost