The Four Streets: Volume 1

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The woman gathering together to cook a huge stew so all the kids would eat that night when times were hard. Aye, they are that too,' came a murmur of acknowledgment, led by Peggy, Maura's next-door neighbour.

Bernadette didn't notice Jerry as he approached her, so focused was she on holding onto the rail of the ship and on keeping in her stomach the fried eggs and bacon she had enjoyed that morning. This type of book is usually my genre of choice – I am a child of the 1950’s and raised in a Roman Catholic household. The Independent's Boyd Tonkin was not impressed by her “stodgy meat-and-potatoes prose” of her first offering, The Clematis Tree, but was surprised by its compassion. The book dealt with some difficult issues but what kept me reading and interested was the humanity and kinship Dorries describes in this impoverished community.

Nadine trained as a nurse, then followed with a successful career in which she established and then sold her own business. Nadine Dorries grew up in a working-class family in Liverpool and spent a great deal of time in Mayo with her Irish grandmother.

The priests were hugely influential amongst the community and combined the role of law keepers, teachers and saviours of souls. I don't want my leisure-time reading to be filled with that type of storyline, and I certainly don't want the description of said abuse to be graphic and prolonged, as it was in The Four Streets. That is not something that can be said of the various novels of Edwina Currie, a former Tory health minister, who surprisingly never won the Bad Sex Award, despite passages such as this, from her debut novel, A Parliamentary Affair, published in 1994: “Then he came at her again, more urgently and hungrily, pushing his tongue down far into her mouth, reaching for her, clutching her body.Fourteen-year-old Kitty Doherty, pregnant with the dead man's child, is a danger to everyone who needs to keep the secret.

Maura was a strong character portrayed as a very capable woman who did her best for all the children in the area. But this book, is about life in a community, I expected harsh realities and even some things that made me uncomfortable, but I wasn't prepared for graphic descriptions of abuse that made me wonder how any child made it through the 1950s.I enjoyed this book, and will carry on to read the others in the series, but I didn't rush onto the 2nd one, I felt I needed a break in between continuing the story. I'm now reading your second book 'HIDE HER NAME', the second book in this trilogy which I will review when I'm finished.