Irish Reads

With St. Patrick's day coming up soon, here some great reads featuring both Irish and Irish American characters. Enjoy!

The Ninth Hour - Alice McDermott

A portrait of the Irish-American experience is presented through the story of an Irish immigrant's suicide and how it reverberates through innumerable lives in early twentieth-century Catholic Brooklyn.









Saints for All Occasions - Courtney J. Sullivan

Nora and Theresa Flynn are twenty-one and seventeen when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan--a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand.



Haunted Ground - Erin Hart

When farmers cutting turf in an Irish peat bog make a grisly discovery—the perfectly preserved head of a young woman with long red hair—Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin must use cutting-edge techniques to preserve ancient evidence. Because the bog’s watery, acidic environment prevents decay, it’s difficult to tell how long the red-haired girl has been buried—two years, two centuries, or even much longer.




The Wonder - Emma Donoghue

Lib Wright, a young English nurse trained by the legendary Florence Nightingale, is sent to rural Ireland to observe Anna, a young girl who is said to have eaten nothing for four months. Lib fully expects to expose Anna's "fast" as a hoax, but her long hours with the girl erode all of her earlier assumptions about Anna, the Irish, and herself.





The Girl in the Castle - Santa Montefiore

Kitty Deverill, the daughter of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, enjoys a life of privilege in Ireland's wild countryside at the side of an increasingly resentful best friend and the vet's son she loves, until the Irish rebellion threatens her beloved home.