Working-class South Boston in the 1970s is the setting for Map of Ireland (Scribner, 2008), a gripping coming-of-age novel by Stephanie Grant '84 about Ann Ahern, an Irish American who is a junior in high school. At the time, Catholic mothers are blockading buses to keep black children from the public schools and teenagers are causing trouble in the streets. Ann becomes infatuated with her beautiful French teacher, Mademoiselle Eugenie, who hails from France by way of Senegal. The young girl embarks on a journey that takes her beyond South Boston, through the fringes of the Black Power movement, and toward love and self-discovery. Grant is an award-winning writer whose first novel, The Passion of Alice, was longlisted for Britain's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently visiting writer at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.