- Published: 04/04/2005
- ISBN: 9781862077560
- 130x20mm
- 256 pages
Protestant Boy
Geoffrey Beattie
Geoffrey Beattie grew up in the notorious ‘murder triangle’ in North Belfast, where during thirty years of the Troubles more than six hundred people were killed. Many of his childhood friends ended up dead or in prison, while Beattie himself moved to England, at first to study and eventually to build a highly successful career as a psychologist. On a visit home to see his ailing mother, Beattie begins to explore his Ulster Protestant ancestry and to reflect on the unfashionable and little understood Protestant community. His search takes him to the trenches of the Somme, to the Plantation villages of Ulster, and to Drumcree for the Orange march. And it also takes him deeper into his mother’s character: at the heart of the book is an extraordinarily vivid portrait of this opinonated, witty, exasperating Ulsterwoman. Protestant Boy is an honest, beautifully written book about the stories that families and cultures tell themselves, and about the silences that they leave behind.
£8.99
Geoffrey Beattie on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Protestant Boy
Geoffrey Beattie
‘I was going home to Belfast to visit my mother. It was the spring of 1998 and the weather was very good for that time of year.’
Essays & Memoir | Granta 52
Men as Chickens
Geoffrey Beattie
‘She had offered four men £2,500 each to live like battery hens for a week.’