Hardback : Piatkus Books ISBN 0.7499.0161.6
Paperback : Warner Books ISBN 0.7515.0620.6
Large print : Magna ISBN 0.7505.0598.2

Rosaleen Magee is the catch of West-Belfast - pretty as a picture and with a reputation as a good, clean-living girl, she is the pride of her parents and the envy of her younger sister Annie and best friend May. For isn't her future already assured as the wife-to-be of Joe Smith, a steady, well set up young man with a thriving builder's business of his own? But, only weeks before her wedding, Rosaleen catches the eye of a different man, and when he begs her for just one date there is something about Sean Devlin's flashing blue eyes and dark good looks that she cannot turn down, even if she wanted to.

After sweetly seducing her, Sean is convinced they were made for each other, but Rosaleen, appalled by the passionate side of her own nature, that Sean has revealed to her, angrily repudiates him and goes ahead with the marriage to Joe. It is doomed to failure. Joe is not the man she has always believed him to be and her brief time with Sean has stirred the sensual, passionate side to Rosaleen. Though stricken with shame and regret, she cannot help secretly longing for the man who awakened her - a longing which is dangerously intensified when he reappears in the Magee family circle, this time as her younger sister Annie's fiancé.

When war breaks out in Europe, Northern Ireland rallies to the British cause; Joe enlists in the army and Rosaleen is left alone with her newborn daughter Laura in bombtorn Belfast - but for stolen visits from Sean, the man she can never have, the man she cannot get out of her mind - the man who is now her brother-in-law. A stirring tale of love, loyalty and family ties against a Northern Irish wartime setting, The Wasted Years is a debut novel of exceptional promise.