‘My Name is Rebecca’

‘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 energetic 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.