Daniels & O'Keefe
1949: A Novel of the Irish Free State
by Morgan Llywelyn.
The masterly epic, The Irish Century, continues in 1949, a sequel to 1916 and 1921.The struggle of the Irish people for independence is one of the compelling historical dramas of the twentieth century. Morgan Llywelyn has chosen it as the subject of her major work, a meticulously researched, multinovel chronicle that began with 1916, continued in 1921, and that she now brings up to the midcentury in 1949.
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The One Year
by Brian J. Gorman .
Sean McNulty takes a year to study abroad at Trinity College Dublin, wanting to escape the ennui of his trust fund life. Sean's father, an Irish-born success story and CEO of a Long Island defense contractor, has the world in the palm of his hand. Neither knows that world events will soon change their lives, as iron curtains and big-money defense contracts become a thing of the past. Sean learns that there is more to European student radicalism than mosh pit angst. Before long, Sean falls prey to a terrorist plot to get military secrets from his father's company, while his father battles to keep his not-so-squeaky-clean empire.
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I'll Know It When I See It: A Daughter's Search for Home in Ireland
by Alice Carey.
Although the author opens with a visit to her mother's native Ireland at 12 and ends with lighting candles in her new home in County Cork four decades later, this is no nostalgic memoir about getting back to your roots. Alice Carey has crafted a tough-minded examination of her complicated relationship with her heritage, a warm tribute to the theatrical free spirits who helped liberate her from an unhappy childhood.
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It's a Long Way from Penny Apples
Cullen's memoir attempts to do for Dublin what Angela's Ashes did for Limerick. Born in the slums in 1942, one of 12 children, Cullen lived a life shaped by hard work, the Catholic Church and family. But unlike McCourt's unrelentingly sad account, Cullen's work trumpets the inner strength and humanity of Irish tenement dwellers. The Cullens may have been poor, but they were resilient
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Irish Stew!
by Andrew M. Greeley
Greeley's fans, and there are many, will appreciate and enjoy this new addition to his popular Nuala Anne McGrail mystery series. Nuala and her devoted husband, Dermot, are amateur crime solvers, often finding themselves in sticky situations and surviving by use of their innate cleverness (with a little help from Nuala's powers of extrasensory perception). In this book, set at an international music festival in Milan, the McGrails really have their hands full.
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Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America
by Tom Hayden
Hayden, a leading student activist in the 1960s and now a California state senator, writes about finding his Irish roots in a book that will have many Irish-Americans up in arms with its take-no-prisoners, leftist spin on Irish history. But he makes some very good cultural points. He speaks, for instance, of the "colonization of the mind" and how this affected the Irish under British rule and as immigrants in America, which largely started with the potato famine of the 1840s.
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My Dream of You
by Nuala O'Faolain.
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."
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1921
by Morgan Llywelyn.Llywelyn's second novel in the series she inaugurated with 1916 (1998) furthers her investigation of Irish history by focusing on Ireland's struggle for freedom from Britain. This volume begins in 1917 in the aftermath of the Easter Rising and carries through to the civil war and the establishment of the Republic of Ireland. |
Tis by Frank McCourt.
The sequel to Frank McCourt's memoir of his Irish Catholic boyhood,
Angela's Ashes, picks up the story in October 1949, upon his arrival in
America. Though he was born in New York, the family had returned to
Ireland due to poor prospects in the United States. Now back on American
soil, this awkward 19-year-old, with his "pimply face, sore eyes, and bad
teeth," has little in common with the healthy, self-assured college students
he sees on the subway and dreams of joining in the classroom.
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A Star Called Henry
by Roddy Doyle.
From Booklist , June 1, 1999
" From the author of the internationally acclaimed Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) comes an exuberant novel depicting Ireland's struggle for
independence in the early years of this century. The story is told in the
voice of Henry Smart, born into harsh poverty in 1901 in Dublin. By age
five, Henry was on his own, living in the streets of the city with his younger
brother Victor in tow. By luck, Henry was smart and strong enough to
survive.
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Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt.
Born in depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants, Frank
McCourt experienced a childhood fraught with poverty and
occasional cruelty. When the family moves back to Limerick, Frank
endures the most miserable of childhoods. An astonishing, glorious
debut, Angela's Ashes recounts McCourt's existence with
remarkable exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.
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The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe. The winner of The Irish Times-Aer Lingus Prize and nominated for
the Booker Prize, this brilliant story of a killer coming of age reads
like "part Huck Finn, part Hannibal Lecter" (New York Times
Book Review). Dark, haunting, and hilarious, the book stuns
readers with its language and chilling portrait of a macabre and
dangerous mind.
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Trinity by Leon Uris.
"In Ireland there is no future, only the past happening over and over again...." Uris selected the period from the famine of the 1840's to the Easter Rising of 1916 to tell the story of Ireland's past, explain the "troubles" of the present and give insight into her future. This Trinity consists of: The Larkin family of Ballyutogue, generations of Catholic hill farmers in Donegal fighting for survival against the harshness of the land and the injustice of the regime.
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The Dead School by Patrick McCabe.
The acclaimed author of The Butcher Boy, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, returns to the rich, emotionally dense landscape of small-town Ireland to explore the inner lives of two men, a schoolteacher and Headmaster, each the product of a soul-stifling culture, each battling his own demons of loss and betrayal.
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TheDeath of an Irish Sea Wolf
A Peter McGarr Mystery by Bartholomew Gill.Fifty years after a foreigner appeared on a remote island off the Irish Coast and began bestowing money and gifts to the townspeople, the island is being ravaged, and Peter McGarr, head of Ireland's Special Crimes Unit, must find out why. |
Pope Patrick by Peter De Rosa. By turns funny, tender, exciting, and controversial, this hilarious satire offers a scathingly brilliant, delightfully droll novel of principles, power, and faith. When kindly Irish priest Brian O'Flynn is chosen as the new pope, he turns out to be the holiest, bravest, most likable pontiff since Saint Peter. |
Snow in August by Pete Hamill.
Brooklyn, 1947: The war veterans have come home, Jackie
Robinson is about to become a Dodger, and, in one close-knit
working class neighborhood, an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy has
just made friends with a lonely rabbi from Prague. A wonderfully
evocative, deeply affecting fable for our times, Snow in August tells
the story of this unlikely friendship.
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A Drinking Life: A Memoir by Pete Hamill. A celebrated journalist, whose career has included writing for both
The New York Post and New York Newsday, provides an
unforgettable memoir of what it means to grow up Irish in New
York--and a frank look at how alcohol shaped those years.
"Energetic, compelling, very funny . . . often brutally
candid."--Entertainment Weekly.
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Reading in the Dark: A Novel by Seamus Deane. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this mesmerizing story of childhood
set amidst the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s is
breathtakingly sad, but vibrant and unforgettable. Haunted by a truth
he both wants and does not want to uncover, the boy narrator of this
novel listens and watches as the world of legend surrounding him
reveals its transfixing reality, unfolding its secrets like a collection of
folktales.
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The Collected Stories
(Vintage International) by John McGahern.
These 34 funny, tragic, bracing, and acerbic stories represent the
complete short fiction of one of Ireland's finest living writers. On
struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile
in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but
touching war against the facts of life.
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Evening Class by Maeve Binchy.
Maeve Binchy can always be counted on to spin an involving tale about ordinary people that brings out the extraordinary in everyone. In Evening Class, Binchy zooms in on the working-class of Dublin. Schoolteacher Aidan Dunne organizes an evening class in Italian with the help of Nora O'Donoghue, an Irishwoman returning home after 26 years in Sicily. When the somewhat squashed-by-life denizens of the surrounding neighborhood take the unexpected step of enrolling in the class, they find their lives transformed. |
Commitments by Roddy Doyle. There is nothing like a band. There is nothing like a soul band. There really is nothing quite like this Irish soul band. This gritty, heart-warming tale of a group of Dublin kids with a dream and a lot of soul will leave you with a warm feeling for the underdogs who almost made it.
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