I generally don’t like to make comparisons between books, but this felt like a gorgeously Irish version of Betty by Tiffany McDaniels with its vivid ensemble of family and its intricate, sometimes ugly dynamics, and in the way that subjects so painful can still survive and go onto bloom into something pretty great.

The growth of Mary, the maturing of Mary and the development of love and intense emotion brought tears to my eyes at the end. Delaney’s true skill here was displaying the complex relationships and emotions experienced by every character in the novel. Everything is vividly raw, no one understands what others are holding close to them, each person has a purpose and will strive for that without sharing their feelings or dreams. It’s a heartbreaking portrayal of how deeply miscommunication can wound us, how sometimes trauma can cause irreparable damage, and how the walls we build can be strong enough to ruin us.Here is where the marriage might mimic the Troubles. Mary's realisation – "Had we ever tried talking to each other I might have known that he was the one person who could understand, the one who'd already been on that lonely, bloodied road" – reads like the beginnings of a peace process. Her older sister leaves, and she reflects that will leave her all alone in the dark in the bedroom on The Hill. No electricity remains burning at night for silly children who should know there is only one thing to fear-losing Gods love and His Good Holy Mother. So Mary was raised with thoughts and her own emotional worries.

This book was a bit of a curate's egg for me. The first part dealing with Mary's childhood before her forced marriage at sixteen was superb. It really captured growing up with a toxic, narcissistic mother in Northern Ireland and resonated so much with my own life down to her mother spelling out regpungant words (to her) such as T.R.A.M.P and the superior holier than thou attitude, belittling and sense of never being good enough or of getting things right. It started to fall apart for me when Mary gets pregnant after her first sexual encounter (how predictable) and is hastly married off to the farmer down the road who is the rumoured who has recently returned heartbroken from that there London (and is himself the rumoured illigetimate offspring of a priest).Oh my goodness, such an apt title. I feel like my heart broke at least 5 times when reading this beautiful book. And I’d do it all over again! On the outside it feels baffling that two people who marry and spend their lives together can be virtual strangers to each other, yet this is the reality of many arranged relationships. Tish Delaney movingly depicts the life of one such Northern Irish woman in her debut novel “Before My Actual Heart Breaks”. Mary Rattigan once dreamed of moving far away and being with her sweetheart, but those aspirations were dashed by the reality of her circumstances. When we meet her at the beginning of this novel it's 2007. She's estranged from her husband and her five children have gone away. Now there's nothing to bind her to the rural farm she's been confined to since she was sixteen but she finds herself questioning the heady plans she made in her youth and finds it difficult to articulate what she now desires. Over the course of the novel we discover the story of how she got to this point as well as a vivid depiction of The Troubles as experienced by a Catholic girl growing up in the 1970s who felt the alarming proximity of this long-term and bloody conflict. It's a story that powerfully represents the tension between the life you wanted and the life you've lived. Beautifully bleak, we follow Mary from the moment her older sister, Kathleen, moves away, taking with her the safety blanket she had wrapped around Mary as the buffer between her and their bitter and twisted mother. Then her innocent and charming narration ages through the years, from whimsy adolescence, to the thoughts of a scorned young woman, exiled by society. This is Northern Ireland around 1970’s. When the bombing, the IRA, Protestants and Catholic’s were head on.

My heart broke for the families of Northern Ireland in the 80s, for the innocent child with an evil mother and pushover father, for the irreplaceable loss of loved ones, for the dreams that suddenly get flushed down the drain and for the longing of a love you so desperately need but never quite feel deserving of. Now, five children, twenty-five years, an end to the bombs and bullets, enough whiskey to sink a ship and endless wakes and sandwich teas later, Mary's alone. She's learned plenty of hard lessons and missed a hundred steps towards the life she'd always hoped for.

Select a format:

But as a Catholic girl with a B.I.T.C.H. for a Mammy and a silent Daddy, things did not go as she and Lizzie Magee had planned. This book is about Mary Rattigan, a young Catholic girl trying to navigate growing up in 1970s Northern Ireland, where the “Troubles [rumble] constantly overhead like a thunderstorm”. She has a bully for a mother, a gormless father and six siblings. At school she shows potential, and dreams she will one day “grow wings and fly” – find a way to emigrate to England or the US and build a better life for herself. How comes there’s something wrong with this book if you, you the nastiest stars giver, gave it 4 stars? That’s a miracle!” Delaney's writing is a beautiful wave flowing lyrically . . . A touching tale of how one woman survives a tough beginning to eventually end up exactly where her heart belongs.' ANNE GRIFFIN, author of When All is Said

This book hooked me from the start… the story of Mary Rattigans abuse at the hands of her mother is raw and painful but at the early stage of the book she still clings to hope that she will leave Tyrone and her mother like her siblings have done. A teenage pregnancy and an inexplicable shotgun wedding changed all her plans. The character Bridie I absolutely came to adore as I did John John but he exasperated me at times as so did Mary although I fully understood why they acted in such a way, and when we find out about john johns past that was so touching. This book takes you by the chokehold. I felt paralysed by Mary’s sense of worthlessness and horrified by her acceptance of the hardships life had handed her; the love and protection she was so cruelly denied. I felt frustrated, too, as her relationship with John Johns stuttered along barely, hoping to shake some sense into them both to just communicate.Her mother forces Mary into a shotgun marriage with a local farmer, John, who lives with his mother. She becomes a farmer's wife, and in the next 25 years goes on to have 5 children, and a strangely weird relationship with John that is characterised by a strong physical, heavily sexually active relations behind closed doors in the bedroom and one of an estranged silence between the two of them in every sphere of life elsewhere, despite their close proximity to each other. In a emotionally charged and heartbreaking narrative, Mary lives through the years as a traumatised woman, growing up in many areas, yet so understandably emotionally stunted in others. It would be all too easy to superficially attribute her feelings towards John as those of hate, things are so much more complicated and can she actually face the truth of what lies between them? Mary falls pregnant at the tender age of sixteen during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Having been brought up harshly and devoutly, an unmarried mother was something to be talked about within the chapel and the community alike. Mary’s mother, someone you’d be stupid be caught talking about in church or community, takes her own action to protect the reputation of the family, and to save her own face. To an extent, this book is a love story but by no means is it your typical run of the mill romance. It’s a love story about dreams, hopes, ambitions, family that aren’t blood and so much more. I just can’t actually comprehend how utterly beautiful this book is?? Tish Delaney is an incredibly talented author indeed. With beautifully written prose, this is a compelling read, particularly if you enjoy Irish literature and strong character driven novels. I wanted to be the one he was paying attention to, just once. Sometimes it felt as if the fabric of the sofa had grown over me and no one had noticed.