Melly Strikes Back

Liverpool, 1970: a dockers' strike, a family's fight for the truth, and a girl who writes it all down.

Liverpool, 1970. Melly Maguire is sixteen, quick-tongued, and already writing things down — the overheard rows, the pub singalongs, the men streaming out of the dock gates. When the dockers come out on strike, the city splits along lines Melly is only beginning to understand; when her father is taken into custody and doesn’t come home, her family’s private grief becomes part of a public fight.

Caught between school and the strike, between what her mother needs and what she owes the truth, Melly does the only thing she knows how to do: she keeps writing. What begins as a girl’s notebook becomes a testament to a family, a street, and a city that refused to go quietly.

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