Fathers Come First

'This book has everything: nuns, sex, confusion, mini skirts, drink, misogyny.' - Shane McGowan Rosita Sweeman's Fathers Come First is a coming-of-age classic set against a Dublin-city backdrop. Elizabeth is both daring and subversive, grappling with the pressures of conforming to societal expectations in 70s Ireland - social, physical and sexual. In a world informed by a Catholic upbringing, she wonders whether her indiscretions belong in the letterbox or the confession box. Curious, unflinching and disarmingly honest, teenager turned twenty-something Lizzie speaks to the changes and continuities in Irish society across forty years. This is a novel as relevant today as when it was first published in 1974.

Rosita Sweetman is a Dublin-based writer and journalist. She is author of the pioneering work On Our Knees: Dublin 1972 and On Our Backs (1979), profiles and interviews that charted the changing mores of the last quarter of the twentieth century in Ireland. Her bestselling Fathers Come First was originally published in 1974. It appears with an Afterword for a new generation of readers.