Overview

'I cannot forget. That memory is always present: it is like a red-hot coal, resting among the blackened cinders of the past. It is a day in September. The year is 1983. I am walking along a Belfast street with my sister, Ruth.' Ruth Porter was killed in a bomb blast in central Belfast. Now, as the day of their 46th birthday approaches, her twin sister Rebecca is compelled to meet her killer, a man who has been freed from jail as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. Rebecca's troubled instinct is to retreat from the ghosts who inhabit her world. Her two closest friends take her by car from Belfast to West Donegal, to Slieve League, the highest sea cliffs in Europe. Here high above the Atlantic, on the 'edge of the world', she attains a startling clarity of vision. The question is, has she the strength to step forward into a new future? Set in Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles, and against the background of social and political change and the economic and cultural development of the time, My Name Is Rebecca explores the nature of loss, grief and guilt, and examines memory, accountability and the place of forgiveness and truth.

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9781914322068

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Sam Burnside was born in Co. Antrim and now lives and works in the city of Derry~Londonderry where he was founder and first Director of the Verbal Arts Centre, an educational charity established in 1992 to promote literature in all its forms. Described by the Derry Journal as 'one of the most important literary figures living in the north west', his work has received praise for its craftsmanship ('verse that is even-pitched and meticulously crafted', Linenhall Review) and for the ways in which it sympathetically explores the experience of living in Northern Ireland. He is the author of 'The Cathedral' a long poem that won the Sunday Tribune/Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry in 1989. His work has attracted a number of literary prizes, including an Allingham Poetry Prize, the University of Ulster's McCrea Literary Award for Literature and a Bass Ireland Award. His poetry has been published and broadcast widely. Sam was awarded an MBE in 2012 for services to the arts.

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