Galloway Street. Growing Up Irish In Exile

This is a book about exile and belonging -- a truthful, funny and moving evocation of a unique place and time, xperienced through the eyes of a child. John Boyle was born and raised in Scotland but he never felt Scottish. His parents were immigrants from the west of Ireland who came to Scotland to find work, and eventually settled in Paisley where John was the first of six children. Galloway Street beautifully captures the poverty and the rough humour of the Boyle family's life in the Paisley tenements, the songs and stories of their Irish Catholic relatives and the often uneasy relationships with their Scottish Protestant neighbours. He also reveals how a trip at the age of ten to visit an aunt on the remote island of Achill was his first introduction to the life his parents left behind.