The Belfast Girl

Book excerpt: Loss is woven into the fabric of motherhood. It starts with a physical separation, a cutting of the cord. Belfast, December 1993, a baby girl goes missing. Everyone, including her teenage father, believes she has been kidnapped. Two women know different. New Yorker Janet O'Connell now has the family she's been longing for. Seventeen-year-old Emma McCourt has a plan to escape her troubled past. And the two women never expect to see one another again. In a story spanning three decades, from a crime-ridden eighties Manhattan, to the final dark days of the Northern Irish Troubles, to suburban New York and modern day Belfast, we learn just how far each woman will go to protect the lives they have made for themselves.