'The perfect pick for those missing their dose of Derry Girls' Irish Examiner

'Entertaining, touching and savagely funny' Sunday Times



'Vital, bang-on, and seriously funny' Roddy Doyle

Smart-mouthed and filthy-minded, Maeve Murray has always felt like an outsider in the shitty wee town in Northern Ireland that she calls home. She hopes her exam results will be her ticket to a new life in London; a life where no one knows her business, or cares about her dead sister. But first she's got to survive a tit-for-tat paramilitary campaign as brutal as her relationship with her mam, iron 800 shirts a day to keep her summer job in the local factory, and dodge the attentions of Handy Andy Strawbridge, her dubious English boss.

Maeve and her two best friends try to squeeze as much fun as possible into their last summer at home. But as marching season raises tensions among the Catholic and Protestant workforce, Maeve realises something is going on behind the scenes at the factory, forcing her to make a choice that will impact her life - and the lives of others - for ever.

"Highly entertaining . . . crackles with good one-liners . . . yet this earthy comedy also has telling things to say about violence and division" - Independent, Books of the Month

"A cracking follow-up - at times savagely funny, but with a loamy undertow of complex feeling . . . Fans of the contemporary Irish authors Lisa McInerney and Louise Kennedy should enjoy it too." - Sunday Times, best popular fiction books of 2022

"This brash and lively novel is a black comedy of great skill and wit . . . Raucous, in your face, sexually frank and (often hilariously) politically incorrect . . . it's intoxicating, defiant, bitter laughter in the dark, knowing comedy at its blackest pitch" - Irish Examiner

"Full of the stuff that we're starting to expect of Michelle Gallen; wild, hilariously angry characters, and language that is vital, bang-on, and seriously funny" - Roddy Doyle

"A wee novel with an enormous, furious heart . . . Honest, hilarious and such a recognisable portrait of 90s Northern Ireland, Factory Girls is an essential read" - Jan Carson

"Majella O'Neill was no flash-in-the-pan - Factory Girls is a powerful second novel. It has all of Gallen's flair for character, her ear for dialogue and her unparalleled sense of comic timing. And this novel cuts deeper, throbs with pent-up fury, a palpable sense of real and urgent despair. Viciously funny" - Lucy Caldwell

"Brilliantly observed and full of heart, Factory Girls will be up there on my list of best books for this year" - Sheila O'Flanagan

"A gorgeous, gritty and hilarious love letter to working class Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Gallen's protagonist, Maeve Murray . . . is a compelling creation who crackles brilliantly from the first pages" - Maeve Galvin

"A riot of a read. A masterclass in voice, the North and the 90s" - Sue Divin

"One of the most moving and hilarious novels I have ever read . . . Factory Girls is one of the best books ever written about the Troubles, and one of the best books I've read in a very long time" - Silas House

"Provocative in more ways than one!" - Melatu-Uche Okorie

"The perfect pick for those missing their dose of Derry Girls" - Irish Examiner

"Impossible to put down, and packed with more humour and poignancy than a Catholic funeral, Factory Girls is a bold and brilliant snapshot of working-class lives during the North's most tumultuous period" - Sunday Business Post

"Original and compelling . . . Gallen's comic, insightful novel . . . shares brilliantly the tangled stories of young women in a struggling provincial town. . . . Factory Girls brings a hidden generation of young women to the literary stage, and does so in a flurry of 'thons' and 'skitters'." - Irish Times

"If the cast of Derry Girls worked in a shirtmaking factory . . . There's a lot of laugh-out-loud humour . . . but at its heart it's an emotional read" - Belfast Telegraph

"Gallen's pen draws blood with the sharpness of her observations, rendering a fresh and acutely more complex portrait of Northern Ireland through Maeve's eyes . . . Brilliantly, wickedly funny and soul-crushingly sad, Gallen has written the Vienetta of books this summer" - Irish Independent

"Funny, poignant and provocative" - Daily Mirror (Ulster)

"This novel is a wonder; the heroine is cheeky, the humour dark, the dialect thick, the sorrow palpable. Fans of Kenneth Branagh's Belfast and television's Derry Girls will find much to love" - Library Journal, starred review

"Darkly comic" - Daily Mail

"One of the most entertaining, engagingly written summer reads you will lay your hands on" - Sunday Life Magazine

"Hilariously funny and heartbreakingly sad. Don't read this book in public if you don't like howling with laughter, or weeping, in front of strangers" - That's Not My Age