The First Day - Tapa dura

The First Day is an age-old story of forbidden love, given fresh resonance against the backdrop of the fractured, changing but still deeply conservative society that is contemporary Northern Ireland.

Phil Harrison writes with compassion and tenderness, never veering into sentimentality, about his young Beckett scholar and the married pastor she falls in love with. He has a screenwriter's ear for the way people talk, the cadences and omissions of their speech, and in particular the speech of religious Ulster, still rooted so deeply in the language and rhythms of the King James Bible. He illuminates a people - a place - seeking to escape from itself, seeking transfiguration, but desperately bound to what has gone before

Outside an east Belfast mission hall, pastor and family man Samuel Orr meets Anna, a young Beckett scholar. They embark on an intense love affair, their connection fuelled by their respective passions. When Anna falls pregnant, the affair is revealed. The repercussions are slow to emerge but inescapable, and the fallout is shocking, cruel and violent.

More than thirty years later Sam, their son, is in New York, living a steady, guarded life, his childhood and family safely abandoned.

But the sins of the fathers are not to be so easily buried; the past crashes inevitably into the present, and Sam is forced to confront the fears he has kept close for decades.