Liverpool, January 1970. Sixteen-year-old Melly Maguire has a notebook, a Saturday job, and a story nobody with a byline is telling.

While the men hold the picket line at the docks, it's the women who hold everything else together: the food banks, the rent arrears, the children of families three weeks behind on everything. Melly starts writing it down — the strike as it's actually lived, rather than how the Echo and the BBC report it — and discovers she has a talent, and a temper, for exactly the kind of journalism nobody commissioned her to do.

Her father is proud of her for it. Proud enough to tell her, plainly, what it will cost him to see her through school and into university, and what he expects from her in return.

Then the strike turns, the police move in, and Da is arrested on the picket line. When the official record reduces what happens to him afterwards to a single word — regrettable — Melly has to decide what she's willing to write down, and say out loud, to make sure it isn't the last true thing anyone says about him.

Grounded in the real Liverpool dock disputes of the 1960s and '70s, and populated with the Irish, Liverpudlian, Nigerian, and Zimbabwean families who lived through them, Melly Strikes Back is a novel about class, community, grief, and the particular courage it takes to tell the truth when the people in charge would very much prefer that you didn't.

Book One of The Melly Maguire Novels. Book Two, Sisters of the Strike, is coming in early 2027.