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"The back yard of Saorise and Daisy’s house can be a perilous place: boys from down the road leave unwelcome ‘presents’ at the gate, the girls’ father comes home late with a swollen jaw, and they have to rush indoors and shut the windows tight when marchers pass, even on the hottest day of the year. And while there is respite to be had at Antonini’s Ice Cream Parlour and in their mother’s bedtime stories, the walls of the house cannot protect this family for ever, and when a tragedy occurs at its heart the fragile ties that bind them together begin to break apart.

Ten years later in rural Ireland, Saoirse is building a new life for herself. She is dreaming again: of her prom night, of her future, and of the wayward but handsome Johnny Mahon. But, as she learns to her cost, she has still not fully escaped the fallout of that unforgettable Belfast summer a decade before. As her past, present and future become inextricably tangled, Saoirse is forced to confront her family’s demons, if she is ever to begin a new life of her own.

Where They Were Missed is a heartbreaking story of domestic tragedy and the loneliness of suffering. In a world where everyday violence taps on the surface of people’s lives, Lucy Caldwell evokes the pain of an incomprehensible loss, as she charts a young girl’s search for forgiveness.

Where They Were Missed was published by Viking in March 2006. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Waverton Good Read Award.

Praise for Where They Were Missed

Where They Were Missed is a work of the highest order: unsettling, unflinching, but finally uplifting. Lucy Caldwell’s touch is both fresh and assured. Here is a literary star in the making.
Glenn Patterson

A debut reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden and Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place.
Vogue

I can think of few novels written by an author in her early twenties which are as accomplished as this one.
David Pierce, Irish Studies Around The World

It is difficult to do justice to the remarkable nature of this novel, so searing in its presentation of naked sorrow and so moving in the heroine’s courage.
Tablet

An assured and arresting tale… A heartbreaking and evocative story… A refreshingly different novel about the Northern tragedy and its ongoing effects on ordinary people.
Rowena Walsh, Irish Independent

A spirited work, for all its sadness, and written with insight and economy.
Patricia Craig, TLS

Excellent… all too believable.
Ireland on Sunday

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Lucy Caldwell's novella, The Furthest Distance, was published on 27th November 2009 by Netherlea Press, the first in a series of novellas written about journeys within Ireland.

Synopsis
Summer 1978, and five-year-old Brooklyn is on her first trip to Northern Ireland. Her daddy's happy to be going home. Her mommy's not: she's dreading going back to the place she's tried her whole life to leave behind. The one thing they agree on is that the train journey from Belfast to Derry is the most beautiful you'll ever make. Just past Castlerock the train thunders between cliff and rocky shore and waves break right up against the tracks. The long journey is almost worth it for those moments alone, they tell her. But for Brooklyn, destined to spend intermittent summers travelling the same route with her mother's frustrated feminism and her father's unfulfilled dreams for stardom, the point of a journey is simply its destination. Until the day when a brief encounter sends her own life in a new direction… The Furthest Distance is a sad, funny, moving meditation on the journeys we make and on how, finally, the furthest distances we travel are those between people.

 

Lucy Caldwell talks to Marie-Louise Muir on BBC Radio Ulster's Arts magazine. To listen to the programme, click here