Now an eminent writer and critic, Patricia Craig was expelled from her convent school in Belfast in 1959.

This was not a time when pupils from respectable families were expelled, and certainly not for ‘carrying-on’ with boys in the Donegal Gaeltacht on a school-organised Irish language course.

Asking for Trouble is an absorbing coming-of-age memoir and a wry and witty account of religious identities, family relationships and growing up in 1950s Belfast and Donegal.

Illustrated with black and white photographs throughout.

Praise for Asking for Trouble

‘This is a powerfully evocative memoir of many things: life in middle-class Belfast in the 1950s, the experiences of teenagers in a convent school, and above all the seminal, magical rite de passage called “going to the Gaeltacht” . . . I found the book refreshingly angry and totally absorbing – I couldn’t put it down.’
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

‘brilliantly drawn characters and scenes … a testament to the triumph of quiet intelligence’
Aisling Foster

‘It’s funny and sweet (in the right sort of way), so sharp in its capturing of time and place that I believed myself to be wandering along that road in Rannafast with the girls.’
Margaret Forster

‘a memorable, dense account of a vanished way of life, a social history, a bid for a restoration, and a brilliant memoir’
Polly Devlin, Irish Times

‘This engrossing and discursive memoir … will surely take its place in the canon of contemporary Ulster literature.’
Edna O’Brien

‘A great read – part memoir, part social history, part literary insight.’
Gerald Dawe

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