Would You Like Belfast Girls in Your Stocking This Year?

Online, November 28, 2010 (Newswire.com) - The new full-length debut novel, Belfast Girls - from Ireland's award-winning author, Gerry McCullough - has just been released on Amazon by new UK publisher, Night Publishing. This story of three girls growing up in contemporary Belfast captures the high life - and lowlife - of these post-conflict times, including drugs, high fashion, addiction and crime.

Gerry has been a successful short story writer for many years - with stories, poems and articles published regularly in magazines and anthologies in Ireland, UK and USA, and broadcast on BBC Radio. In 2005 she won the Cuírt International Literary Award in Galway, Ireland, for her short story, Primroses, and has been shortlisted/commended for other awards since then.

Says Gerry of Belfast Girls, "I'm bouncing off the walls! It's something I've lived for and worked for my whole life, so I couldn't tell you how happy I am. I'm hoping for a lot of support from the people of Ireland and beyond and I think the book is something everyone will enjoy."

Her first novel follows the lives and loves of three girls from different religious backgrounds. In a city where such differences often separate, the girls manage to remain firm friends into adulthood. Their love lives are much more complicated, though. Sheila, the 'ugly duckling turned beautiful swan', becomes a successful super-model - dubbed the 'ice maiden' - but hides her unhappiness and dissatisfaction beneath the ice cool exterior.

Phil sets her heart on Davy, but he gets more and more entangled in the local crime scene, eventually dragging her down with him. Mary is wild and uncontrolled - until she almost overdoes it - then manages to re-build her life on a more solid foundation. John is all that Davy is not - solid, ambitious, serious, but also self-righteous, angry and conflicted. Drawn to one another, yet somehow repelled, John and Sheila's love affair is more off than on. Where will it end?

Belfast Girls managed to make it to the top of the HarperCollins' Authonomy.com site last April, earning Gerry a review from this major publisher. But it was Night Publishing, a smaller UK company, which actually offered to publish her first novel - without forcing it into any particular 'genre' pigeon-hole. The result is a novel which has plenty for everyone - action, emotion, gunmen, kidnapping, glamour and despair.

This novel is a thriller, romance, comedy and drama, rolled into one - as Gerry says, "Like most people's lives!" So, why not put Belfast Girls into your stocking this season?

Belfast Girls paperback/Kindle editions available on Amazon.com, Kindle edition also on Amazon.co.uk
Belfast Girls cover photo: http://www.preciousoil.com/gerry/images/BG_front_cover.jpg
Photos of Gerry available by request from: [email protected]
Gerry McCullough website: http://www.gerrymccullough.com (fan page also on FaceBook)