Potato Famine

Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1850

In 1845, a disaster struck Ireland. Overnight, a mysterious blight attacked the potato crops, turning the potatoes black and destroying the only real food of nearly six million people.

Over the next five years, the blight attacked again and again. These years are known today as the Great Irish Famine, a time when one million people died from starvation and disease and two million more fled their homeland.
Black Potatoes is the compelling story of men, women, and children who defied landlords and searched empty fields for scraps of harvested vegetables and edible weeds to eat, who walked several miles each day to hard-labor jobs for meager wages and to reach soup kitchens, and who committed crimes just to be sent to jail, where they were assured of a meal. It's the story of children and adults who suffered from starvation, disease, and the loss of family and friends, as well as those who died. Illustrated with black and white engravings, it's also the story of the heroes among the Irish people and how they held on to hope.

The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849

My Dream of You

Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes the old feminist adage one step further: the personal is invariably political in this exquisite first novel, while its politics feel very personal indeed. The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is an Irish travel writer living in London. Estranged from her homeland and her family, pushing 50 but still living in the same dingy basement flat that's been her home for two decades, Kathleen's is a life gone "even and dry." Love has been her traditional panacea: "I believed in passion the way other people believed in God: everything fell in place around it." But the only love that comes her way these days takes the form of grim, anonymous sex--and even that grows harder to find.

Oddly enough, it's history--her own, and Ireland's--that brings Kathleen back to life. Shattered by a close friend's death, she leaves her job and London to immerse herself in a 150-year-old divorce case. In 1849, according to court documents, the Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Talbot divorced his wife because she committed adultery with their ragged Irish groom. Or did she? The book Kathleen imagines writing about the affair is a classic tale of passion--yet her research turns up a more complicated story, even as love once again makes inroads into her own life.

My Dream of You shares some of the same preoccupations as O'Faolain's bestselling memoir Are You Somebody?: a distant and loveless family life, the plight of Irish women. But it's the historical narrative that gives Kathleen's story both context and shape, juxtaposing the affair inside the demesne walls with the famine outside. The excerpts from her "Talbot Book" are searing in their intensity, studded with images of great beauty and unimaginable suffering. Some readers might in fact wish the book's balance tipped even further in the Talbot direction. Then, however, we might miss the author's heartbreakingly nuanced portrait of Kathleen's loneliness:

It was never real excitement that got you into bed; it was hope, like some stubborn underground weed. Look at the way you've believed every time, at the first brush of a hand across a breast, that the roof over your life was sliding back and a dazzling, starry firmament was just coming into view.

This compelling novel by Nuala O'Faolain intertwines the stories of two women, an Irish travel writer living in present-day London, and a British landowner's wife during the 19th century potato famine, who was convicted of committing adultery with an Irish groom.

"A lovely heartbreaker of a novel that asks the hard questions...O'Faolain writes beautifully about longing and regret." (USA Today)

"We often hail the virtuosic performance of a talented new 'writer's writer,' but O'Faolain may be a rarer thing in today's age of irony: a reader's writer, with a flair for straightforward, Dickensian storytelling." (Vogue)

"One of the finest achievements of the book is its unflinching, empathetic depiction of just how it feels...to experience the chill clutch of the thought that the rest of one's life might be empty of love, sex, intimate human contact...a fully rendered portrait." (The New York Times Book Review)

The Law of Dreams: A Novel

Driven from the only home he has known during Ireland’s Great Hunger of 1847, Fergus O’Brien makes the harrowing journey from County Clare to America, traveling with bold girls, pearl boys, navvies, and highwaymen. Along the way, Fergus meets his three passionate loves–Phoebe, Luke, and Molly–vivid, unforgettable characters, fresh and willful.

Based on Peter Behrens’s own family history, The Law of Dreams is lyrical, emotional, and thoroughly extraordinary–a searing tale of ardent struggle and ultimate perseverance.

Gracelin O'Malley

Nineteenth century Ireland comes vividly to life in what Publishers Weekly calls the "finely wrought tale" of Gracelin O'Malley; her brilliant, crippled brother Sean; and their childhood friend, Morgan McDonagh, the reluctant hero of a revolution.

Marriage to English landlord Bram Donnelly elevates Grace into a world at once fascinating and challenging, but acceptance is slow, and her husband becomes increasingly cruel. When potato blight devastates the countryside, Grace feeds the growing number of starving tenants who turn to the manor, defying her husband and bringing his wrath down upon her head; she compromises - for the sake of their young child - and strikes a twisted bargain that leads, in the end, to Donnelly's murder. As political unrest sweeps across the land, and suspects are rounded up, Grace harbors Irish rebels - her own fanatical brother among them - hiding, as well, the deepest secret of her heart. And as disaster threatens those she loves most, Grace fights to keep them alive, her profound courage affecting everyone around her.

The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America

A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland

Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine

Tom Hayden, antiwar activist of the 1960s, has lately been spending much time exploring his ancestors' lives in the Ireland of the famine years. Enlisting contributors on both sides of the water, among them Eavan Boland, Jimmy Breslin, Seamus Heaney, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Tim Pat Coogan, Hayden here offers a collection of personal responses to that historic catastrophe--which, more than one essayist notes, not only killed and displaced millions of Irish but also undid much of traditional Irish culture, for, as Ní Dhomhnaill notes, 90 percent of the Famine's victims were monolingual Irish speakers, and with them perished a huge store of knowledge and memory. She also remarks that the Irish have done much to come to terms with the catastrophe in recent years; "it is a sign of our recovery from the collective trauma of the Famine that we can finally objectify it, and put it outside our psyche, the better to study it objectively."

Some of the pieces are less successful, but most have a fine air of both scholarly solidity and political engagement. Hayden brackets the collection with sensitive essays on his explorations of the past, noting that American Indians from a soon-to-be-displaced eastern tribe sent $170 in relief funds to Ireland, recognizing, as he suggests, that they had much in common with their fellow sufferers at the hands of empire. --Gregory McNamee

Discoveries: Irish Famine (Discoveries (Abrams))

The Great Irish Famine (New Studies in Economic and Social History)

The Irish Famine of 1846-50 was one of the great disasters of the nineteenth century. Cormac Ó Gráda's concise survey puts the Famine in the context of the Irish economy, assesses the Famine itself, and discusses its many consequences. Despite a devastating food shortage, the huge death toll of one million was hardly inevitable; a less doctrinaire attitude to famine relief could perhaps have saved many lives. This book provides an up-to-date introduction to an event of major importance in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and Britain.

The Irish Famine of 1846-50 was one of the great disasters of the nineteenth century. Despite a devastating food shortage, the huge death toll of one million was hardly inevitable. This book provides an up-to-date introduction to an event of major importance in the history of Ireland and Britain.