100 books like The Speckled People

Edna O’Brien’s 2012 autobiography Country Girl is a blunt, gripping, lyrical and non-self-pitying depiction of her early life in the west of Ireland. It exposes the stultifying conformity imposed by the Catholic Church, family and community which I experienced myself. She rebelled as she sought freedom and self-expression from a domineering mother and drunken father. Edna’s escape to Dublin, London and New York as well as her exile from Ireland reflects an individual addicted to drugs and alcohol who seeks acknowledgement, liberty and success through many failed relationships. Edna’s autobiography resonates with many of my own experiences of the 1960’s. Country Girl demonstrates how one Irish female writer broke the cultural silence so that others would not feel alone. Her writing was an inspiration to me for my own memoir.

In 1899, the Irish novelist, Hannah Lynch wrote her memoir Autobiography of a Child. She caused controversy in Ireland and abroad by attempting to represent her childhood up to the age of twelve narrated through the child’s voice, a strategy I adopted but from the ageing child’s point of view where the language and thought process become more complex as I grow older. Her use of adult reflection upon the child’s unstable memory demonstrates an original understanding of the child’s point of view and its representation. Hannah uncovered the inescapable cycle of harsh treatment by her parents within a large family and the physical abuse by nuns at school. Her book reinforces the unreliability of memory for autobiography and helped me to accept that total veracity is not possible.

McGinley’s 2011 autobiography That Unearthly Valley: A Donegal Childhood is a carbon copy of my own upbringing in a small rural, Irish and narrow-minded community in County Donegal in the mid-twentieth century where the dominance and hypocrisy of the Catholic priest and school instilled fear and religious compliance in daily life. 

McGinley’s clearly narrated memories reveal a young man’s frustration at the silent and secret practices of those in authority from which his only escape was education and by disowning his birthplace. His descriptions of feeling like an outcast hhelpme to question the traumatic impact of our childhoods upon our adult lives. Like myself, it was only by distancing himself from home that he was able to lay bare a disturbing existence of repression.

John McGahern’s Memoir is a chronological narrative of his experiences in County Leitrim Ireland from the age of three. His continuous prose of detailed descriptions of places, people, and incidents combined with the child’s voice create a brutal home and school environment from which his only escape is the beauty of the local landscape. His contrasting depiction of his brutal father and loving mother resurrects my parents’ behaviour. He uses the most effective order of words to create a gripping narrative to represent Irish family silence. John’s precise style creates an addictive tension hooking me to every word where I am left to ponder on what is not said. John’s narration of his experiences encouraged me to partially adopt his approach in my own memoir.

Irish men and women in the United States launched a movement to liberate their homeland from British rule.

David Brundage’s Irish Nationalists in America, the first history of this movement as a whole, ranges across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, covering the full range of ideological positions—from peaceful constitutional change to an Irish republic achieved through violent means—and exploring how Irish-American nationalism intersected with movements for labor reform, racial equality, and women’s rights in the United States.

A skilled social and political historian, Brundage tells a vivid story about how ordinary immigrants built an extraordinary movement.

I read this book while working on an alternate reality graphic novel for Marvel Comics, X Men Noir, in which we had the Empire State Building as an active docking spot for airships (as intended).

Turns out the actual Great Depression-era construction of the ESB was even more harrowing and fascinating than in our book, as Kelly makes clear here.

From mud and muck to modernity? This elegant examination of the margins of interwar Poland sheds much light on the ins and outs of belonging as well as broader Polish ambitions of being considered part of the civilized world. While Kathryn Ciancia focuses on the push to modernize the ethnically complex eastern borderland that was the province of Volhynia, inhabited by Jews and Ukrainians as well as Poles, she also importantly situates Poland within a global framework.

If I want to write novels that promote steps toward peaceful solutions to seemingly intractable global problems, I must invoke Mahatma Gandhi’s spirit. His practical application of nonviolence was pivotal to achieving India’s independence from England, and it is a model for us all. In Great Soul, Lelyveld depicts a man beset by doubt, who recognized his own fallibility, and yet he was able to change the world – without violence and without sacrificing his principles. I would hope that in reading this excellent biography, I have learned something about how to get things done peacefully in our complex world, and to imagine a better day.

French’s Dublin Murder Squad series introduces readers to the Dublin-based Gardai, who investigate and solve violent crimes in and around Dublin, Ireland. What I love most about this series is that each book follows a different detective within the same unit and their unique relationships with Dublin and the surrounding areas. French explores not just the crime but also the men and women who solve it. I love how these people are flawed, and they make mistakes while doing their jobs. 

In this installment, Rob Ryan returns to the site of his own childhood trauma to investigate a repeat of a twenty-year-old crime. I love a facing-one-demons plot, and this one doesn’t disappoint. 

A beautiful read set otherwise on a very dark backdrop. Learning of Lisa Jura’s journey on the Kindertransport to a country she’s never been to at the age of fourteen, really exemplifies the very difficult, and not fair, choices parents were forced to make during this time period. However, the memoir really demonstrates the power of music and hope to uplift and fulfill many human needs.