Give Them Stones — Mary Beckett

Until the day they shot a boy in both legs up against Matha's wall, she had never been one for taking risks in that precarious corner of Belfast. But she couldn't agree with the Provos taking the law into their own hands. Ever since being a school child, she had despised bullying. Her own was a gentle rearing, if a materially poor one. Over sixty years of dramatic events in Belfast are viewed in this novel through the eyes of a perfectly ordinary woman who was exposed to war, murder, bombings and curfews. "Give Them Stones" was the winner of the Sunday Tribune Arts Award for Literature (1987). Mary Beckett is also the author of "A Woman of Belfast".