Gracelin O'Malley

Grace is the beloved daughter of a poor tenant farmer in 1840's Ireland. Farmers made a precarious living at that time, required to pay rent to absent landowners in England, with a potato crop that might or might not make, often unable to feed their children or themselves. Grace catches the eye of the son of one of the wealthy English landowners, and she quickly is married off to Bram Donnelly in a move that she thinks will offer her family some measure of security. But it is not to be. Bram Donnelly is not what he seems, and the potato blight and a spirit of revolution throughout Ireland throw the world into a nightmare of hunger and war and starvation that nothing, seemingly, can quell.

Gracelin O'Malley is a bit of a soap opera, true, with characters that feel decidedly good or wicked, and with an unending series of tragedies that blast the characters over and over and over, until the little bits of happiness the characters receive startle and amaze the reader for their unexpectedness. It's compelling historical fiction, nevertheless, and everyone in our book club reported that they could not put the book down once they began the narrative, and most say they will continue to read on in the trilogy.