Factory Girls

Irish writer Gallen (Big Girl, Small Town) offers a sharp chronicle of the coming-of-age of three Catholic teenage girls during the waning days of the Troubles. In the summer of 1994, acerbic Maeve Murray, fancy Aoife O’Neill, and timid Caroline Jackson all take jobs at the shirt factory in their tiny Northern Ireland town while they await their A-level results. Maeve, desperate to get away from the painful memory of her older sister’s suicide, rents an apartment with Caroline and daydreams of her escape to journalism school in London while ironing piles of shirts and grappling with her sexual attraction to her shifty British manager, who doesn’t return her advances but boosts her wages and has a reputation for sleeping with employees. Aoife, who has her sights on Cambridge, also works an iron but finagles her way into training for a higher-skilled position, while Caroline winds up having to manage her expectations. The three develop a camaraderie as they deal with the disdain and cruelty of their Protestant coworkers and try to figure out their futures. Gallen offers piercing snapshots of the characters’ everyday lives amid steady bursts of sectarian violence, such as Maeve’s mother getting discounts on shoes after the store’s glass is shattered by a bomb. This is lovely. Agent: Marianne Gunn, O’Conor Creative. (Nov.)