Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre

About this book

Belfast, 1972. For sixteen years Nora Devlin has taught Catholics and Protestants alike to drive in a bottle-green Morris Minor with a second brake on the passenger side and one rule taped to the dashboard: nobody in this car asks where you're going. Then a car bomb kills six people on a street she knows lesson by lesson, and the witnesses describe a driver who handled the car exactly as she teaches. Within a week the Army, the police and both paramilitary sides want her logbooks, and her son Eamon has stopped coming home. Twenty-six years later, in the week of the Good Friday Agreement referendum, her granddaughter comes north to close the school and finds one page razored out of the 1972 book. What do we hand on to those we teach, and are we answerable for where they drive it?