Fans pick 100 books like Letters of the Catholic Poor

I picked up this book while I was on maternity leave and had it finished by the end of the day. I just couldn’t put it down–and luckily, my baby slept a lot that day! It’s definitely one of my all-time favorite novels.

It is an incredibly absorbing fictional love story. It focuses on a young Catholic woman, Cushla, who works as a teacher and her relationship with a Protestant married man named Michael, set against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

I live in Northern Ireland now although I didn’t grow up there, so I found this a really insightful read by an author who did spend some of her childhood in Northern Ireland. I’ve loved seeing this book feature on prize lists because I think the attention it has received to date is really well deserved.

I don’t know how much I knew of nineteenth-century Ireland when I first read this book as a child, but I certainly wanted to know a whole lot more after reading it. And after years of researching and teaching nineteenth-century Irish history, I still love this book!

This is a wonderfully written and extremely moving account of Irish emigration to the US in the nineteenth century, as told by (fictional) teenager Peggy O’Driscoll. It is the second in a trilogy, which includes the more well-known Under the Hawthorn Tree about the Great Irish Famine. I love them all, but this one was always my favorite, following the challenges and adventures that Peggy had in the ‘new world.’

I enjoy dipping in and out of books that bring to the fore, for the first time, collective stories of diverse Irish women. Two stand out for me in 2024. Angela Byrne’s very readable Anarchy and authority focuses on the Irish in Russia from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.

I love how she is so creative with seemingly mundane or silent sources, like a list of visitors to the mountain town of Spa (in modern-day Belgium), using it to illuminate relationships and weave together very different lives. But Byrne is also honest about the historian’s challenges and her frustrations when the archives refuse to confirm in writing her hunches about what happened.

I am currently fascinated by the extraordinary women’s histories in Clodagh Finn and John Morgan’s The Irish in the Resistance: The Untold Stories of the Ordinary Heroes who Resisted Hitler. Neither of these books… show more.

Maria Luddy is one of the pioneers of Irish women’s history. I love this book because it was one of the first to focus in such a specific way on women and crime/deviancy in the Irish past, paving the way for subsequent research in this field over the past two decades.

The author uses sources found in archives and libraries to offer glimpses of the experiences of women who sold sex in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland and the world in which they lived. The historical context is very well developed, with assessments of annual statistical returns, reports of hospitals and other institutions, and analysis of contemporary attitudes. It is an impressively detailed book, but is also very readable and is a go-to for those of us researching Irish women and crime.

I have a soft spot for women during times of war or adversity. This story spans the early years of the 1900s as Maggie lives her father’s legacy to “make a difference in the world.” She never gives in, or gives up, and contributes to the safety of those around her during the end of the Great War and troubles in Ireland. Setting is a big thing for me, and in this book the location, the surroundings, and the times evoked an understanding of Ireland and the Irish. As with the fictional characters I like most, Maggie is a person I’d love to have as a friend.

I loved Jeanette Walls honest and raw telling of her father’s mental illness and her mother’s unorthodox mothering and the impact they both had on her childhood and adulthood. People with mental illness are often portrayed as villains with no redeeming qualities.

Still, Walls finds the bits and pieces of her father that are beautiful, made her childhood sometimes magical, and led to her own successful career and life. 

An illustrated book of long-form nonfiction that examines poor Black, Indigenous, White, and Migrant communities in the United States, and how they have all been broken by extractive capitalism and racist public policy. Hedges’ writing is intentionally polemical, designed to shatter any illusions about the welfare of our fellow citizens living in communities ruined by racism and industrial-scale environmental degradation. Sacco’s long-form graphic illustrations are equally haunting. I’ve taught this book continually for many years.

One of the most important new issues faced by rights advocates is climate change. Macarthur genius award-winner Catherine Coleman Flowers is on the front line of that fight, based on her own childhood as the daughter of an activist Black family in Lowndes County, Alabama. This memoir captures Flowers’ essence: someone who just can’t let an injustice slide by. And she will talk to anyone who might be able to help, including with cleaning up the raw sewage that continues to poison the homes of many poor Alabamians. Flowers clearly describes the link between local rights issues and the global campaign to deal with climate change.

I recommend this book for any leader seeking to better understand their ‘why’. I have long admired Jacqueline Novogratz and Acumen and while not her most famous book, this one really gets deep into the inside of what motivates Jacqueline and the work she does at Acumen.

As someone who considers themselves to be values-led, I deeply admire how Jacqueline doesn’t shy away from the ethics of financing social and impact enterprises and instead leans in to explain her thinking in this book and to challenge our collective moral imagination about what is right.

It is also filled with useful examples and interviews with changemakers across the globe, which helps bring her work and the concepts in the book to life. A must-read for anyone interested in impact-first investing. 

I have long believed that development economists rely too heavily on reductive formal models that ignore on-the-ground realities and are backed by scant empirical evidence. This book makes a compelling case for observation—particularly in the form of randomized controlled trials that approximate scientific experiments “in the field.”

I admire its rigorous use of the scientific method to critique theoretical approaches that draw much of their legitimacy and influence from technical sophistication and abstraction.