Girl on a Bicycle

Julie De Vraie is young, impressionable and passionate. However, she lives at a most passionless time. Against the backdrop of the 'Emergency' at home, the chaos in Europe, the Catholic state and her own Protestant upbringing she searches for freedom. To be free was to be an outcast, and as such, she becomes imprisoned in a deep chaos of her own.

Girl on a Bicycle is Leland Bardwell's first novel and it introduced several of the themes that continue to resurface in Bardwell's subsequent writing. Dislocation, antiauthoritarian tendencies, sexual curiosity tempered by the stringencies of the day, and the confusion and castigation of the 'misfit' all merge in this coming-of-age novel. This book also serves to illuminate a society that is coming of age and is pushing against its own boundaries of independence, religion and new found nation identity in a Europe torn apart by war. Booker prize-nominated author, Anthony Burgess has described it as 'a literary gem'.

Author: Leland Bardwell

Publisher: Liberties Press

Released Date: 2009

ISBN: 9781905483792