The Women of Harbour Street

Every town keeps a version of the truth. These women kept the original.

Orla Sweeney has built a career turning other people’s messy truths into clean documentaries. She has no intention of becoming the subject of one.

But when a storm tears open the wall of her family’s failing cinema in the Irish harbour town she escaped, Orla discovers thirty-one videotapes hidden behind the screen.

Recorded after a fatal factory fire in 1998, the women on the tapes tell a story Cuanmore has spent nearly three decades refusing to hear: a chained exit, an altered record and a young mother who died trying to save her co-workers.

Releasing the tapes could clear a dead woman’s name. It could also destroy Orla’s father, fracture her oldest friendship and collapse the housing development that may be the only route out of emergency accommodation for the dead woman’s daughter.

Keeping them hidden would protect the living—but only by asking the vulnerable to pay for silence all over again.

As sisters, daughters, witnesses and former friends fight over who owns the truth, Orla must confront the question at the centre of every story she has ever edited:

Who gets the last word?

Set on Ireland’s Atlantic edge, The Women of Harbour Street is a warm, sharp and emotionally gripping novel about family loyalty, public memory and the difficult work of telling the truth without stealing it.