94 books like The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing, 1200-1600

First published in 1839 this is a fascinating history of Ireland from an outsider’s perspective. De Beaumont, a Frenchman, was a grandson of Lafayette and a lifelong friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America. He visited Ireland in 1835 and two years later L’Irlande appeared in two volumes, with an English translation later that year. An intellectual tour de force, the book was an immediate bestseller and remained popular for decades. His contemptuous howl of outrage directed at the British administration in Ireland reverberated down the nineteenth century.

This is a little historical gem. The author was the wife of the British consul to Constantinople in 1718 and wrote copious letters home detailing her travels and her life in the Ottoman Empire’s capital. She describes the exoticism, the requirement that women be veiled in public (which she saw as freeing), the sumptuous jewels and wealth, the admiration of pregnant women (and the pressure to be pregnant to prove you were still young).   

Her description of smallpox ‘parties’ is particularly interesting. These gatherings were held annually to inoculate children by using a tiny amount of smallpox pus scratched into the forearm. A survivor of smallpox herself, Mary had her own small son successfully inoculated and brought the knowledge back with her to England, but it was not until Edward Jenner introduced a vaccine later in the century that a treatment became more widely known.

The fascination of this book is its portrayal of the human cost involved in the fall of a civilisation. After the Bolshevik Revolution the cream of Russian society, including most of the aristocrats, the professional classes, the officer class, the middle class, fled Russia with little but the clothes on their backs. Being Francophone, most of them sought refuge in Paris only to find there destitution. Grand Dukes who formerly had palaces, country estates and scores of servants, now drove taxis, waited at table, washed dishes; Grand Duchesses embroidered for fashion houses (the lucky ones), all yearning for their homeland and being, as time passed, regarded with less and less tolerance by the French.  

The book is a reminder that catastrophe waits only for opportunity.

How many people know what happened to Marie Antoinette’s daughter? This book focuses on this tragic, formidable woman and her extraordinary life, from her birth in a crowded bedroom where they had to break the widows to provide fresh air to her fainting mother, to her three year imprisonment during the Terror, to her secret escape from France after the murder of her family. She found refuge in several European countries and married her cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême. Many historians claim that on the abdication of his father (Charles X, a brother of the executed Louis XVI), he became King for twenty minutes and his wife, thereby, became briefly the last Queen of France of the senior Bourbon line. 

Why, from the 1990s, did the Irish Catholic consensus so suddenly disappear? And what might be the effect of this sudden-onset secularisation? This brilliant account of the recent revolution in Irish religion describes the effects of the clerical scandals that brought down a government, demoralised a denomination, and drove social change on a massive and structural scale. Ganiel shows how the older religious monopolies that did so much to shape the institutions and culture of Ireland, north and south, have given way to a much more fluid religious market, in which individuals can believe without belonging just as much as they might formerly have belonged without believing.

Rebel Knot is set in 17th-century Ireland, torn apart by religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. This is a war-ravaged Ireland, a land where hope is in short supply and peace is more of a dream than a possibility. And yet, in the midst of all that violence fragile love can flourish—even between people who belong on opposite sides of the religious fence. Ms. Bazos does a fantastic job of transporting the reader back in time, and her two main characters, Niall and Ainé, are wonderfully complex and relatable. The harshness of the times is vividly depicted—as is the growing attraction between the innocent and traumatised Ainé and her new protector, Niall. 

John Banville writes like the Booker Prize winner he is.

Set in remote Ireland in 1957, this book made me glad my ancestors got out of there when they did!

I enjoyed the contrast between the secretive Catholic villagers and the tough, pragmatic detective, a Protestant. I saw my relatives in this moody book.

Long before traveling to Ireland, I wanted to learn all I could about those who live there. 

I have found that the best way to achieve that goal is to read historical fiction novels that present an incisive portrait of the Irish people—their often-tragic history, rich culture, traditions, and day-to-day living. The human stories bring the book to life, involving you directly in the characters’ lives. Trinity made me feel that I was living in the past, experiencing history firsthand.

This is an eyewitness account of the Great Hunger in Ireland for the years 1847-1849, written by an American woman who felt pity for the poor Irish immigrants fleeing their native land. Her first trip to Ireland was just before the Great Hunger and although conditions were bad then, they were much worse on her second visit. Her accounts allow the reader to see what takes place through her eyes and they are harrowing at times. Not only does the author inform us of the dire situation of the poor but she also pays tribute to those who lost their lives in the struggle to help others. This was one of the books I used as a reference while writing my own series.

This novel, published in 1949, is about three grown-up siblings who are still dominated by the memory of their famous parents, both accomplished performers, and their atypical early years, which they spent playing in theaters across Europe. Though the majority of the novel takes place after the parents have died, the ties of family remain paramount for the three protagonists. At times each one feels desperate to escape those ties, but their shared past exerts an irresistible pull on all three. Unusually, the novel is narrated in the first-person plural: the narrative often refers to “us,” but tells each sibling’s individual scenes in the third person. With its three intertwined threads, The Parasites vividly explores the lifelong influence of family bonds.