Book excerpt: Just before Christmas, in Ireland in the late 1980s. Violence, religious terror, hostility and exclusion determine everyday life in a district near Belfast. "Sandy is what keeps me alive," Laurina says to her mother one day. It's the day the eleven-year-old girl begins to struggle against an unimaginably dreary life. At the new school everyone is against Laurina and her sister Sandy because they are not honest Catholics like the other kids say. While the mother tries to get through every day with whatever jobs to feed her children, they are also despised for their apparent poverty. When they are then separated from their mother, their world collapses. Only one classmate is gradually bringing Laurina's trust and hope back - but this boy of all people is hiding a big, serious secret... A social drama set in Ireland in the late 1980s, it tells the story of a girl who would go through hell for her little sister.