It’s 1971 in deeply Catholic Dublin, and contraception is illegal. 

Women in the city’s overcrowded tenements are giving birth year after year, often with little say over their own bodies.

Young nurse Brianna Robinson is determined to build a life beyond the expectations placed upon her. While her mother dreams of a safe office job and a suitable husband, Brianna dreams of hospital wards, independence and purpose.

In The Belfast Express, Melbourne midwife Brigid Carrick recreates the Ireland she knew as a young woman, drawing on her own experiences training and working in Dublin before emigrating to Australia in 1969.

What unfolds is a coming-of-age story set against one of Ireland’s most restrictive social eras, when Church and State tightly controlled women’s lives.

The novel takes inspiration from a real and defining moment in Irish history.

In May 1971, members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement famously travelled by train from Dublin to Belfast, where contraception was legal. 

They purchased supplies and returned openly in an act of civil disobedience that became known as the ‘Contraception Train’.

The protest became a landmark moment in Ireland’s women’s liberation movement.

In Brigid’s novel, that journey becomes personal:

‘By the time the Belfast Express pulled into Connolly Station, we hoped we were ready enough. Shauna, Muriel, Iris and I juggled our luggage and newly made signs onto the platform. Awkwardly, we held up our undergarment placards and banners, hoping enough women would join us for a fighting chance against the Customs Officers who were waiting for us at the barriers…’

Customs inspections. Police attention. Media scrutiny.

The Belfast Express was no longer just a train. It was a statement!

But for Brianna, the rebellion begins long before the station platform.

Assigned to midwifery in the grim slums of Dublin, Brianna encounters families crammed into single rooms, women trapped in cycles of perpetual pregnancy, hidden violence and the suffocating moral codes of the era.

Behind closed doors, difficult decisions are made about who can cope, who cannot, and what happens to the babies born into impossible circumstances.

When Brianna’s own life takes an unexpected turn, she finds herself drawn into a growing resistance of women who refuse to accept that morality should be legislated through motherhood.