MORE ON 19TH- CENTURY IRELAND

The Convictions of John Delahunt Andrew Hughes (2014)

John Delahunt, a yyoung man who hhas sunk ever further into amorality after hhis recruitment to spy on his fellow citizens by a sinister government agent, is imprisoned for the murder of a child. Taking up his pen, he tells his own story of how he came to do what he did. Set in Dublin in 1841 and based on real-life events, this is a powerful novel of crime, betrayal and punishment.

The Wonder Emma Donoghue (2016)

An English nurse, who has served with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, arrives in a small Irish village where 11-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a so- called ‘ fasting girl’, has attracted the attention of the outside world. Anna’s apparent ability to survive without food seems to some a miracle sent from God but, in Donoghue’s beautifully written novel of misplaced faith and psychological manipulation, the nurse begins to see something more sinister in the girl’s experiences.

The Good People Hannah Kent (2017)

In a remote valley in rural Ireland in the 1820s, Nóra, a recently bereaved widow, and Nance, the local ‘wise woman’, become convinced that Nóra’s disabled grandson is a changeling. The ‘Good People’ or the fairies have snatched away the real boy, replacing him with one of their own, and only Nance’s rituals can bring him back. In Kent’s moving novel, folk beliefs and the rules of wider society come into conflict with tragic results.