Here are 100 books that Wildflower Girl fans have personally recommended if you like
Wildflower Girl.
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There is still so much to know about Irish girls’ and women’s lives, and I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to books that explore these themes, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I work as a historian and professor of Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. I love archival research and often find it really exciting to order a file or box in the archives or pull up a newspaper, not knowing what story it is going to tell or what insight I am going to get of an individual’s world in the written records left behind. I hope that you like my choices!
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.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
“Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.”—J.Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Book Review
“TRESPASSES vaults Kennedy into the ranks of such contemporary masters as McCann, Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, and fellow Sligo resident, Kevin Barry.” —Oprah Daily
Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.
Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast, teaching at a parochial school and moonlighting…
There is still so much to know about Irish girls’ and women’s lives, and I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to books that explore these themes, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I work as a historian and professor of Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. I love archival research and often find it really exciting to order a file or box in the archives or pull up a newspaper, not knowing what story it is going to tell or what insight I am going to get of an individual’s world in the written records left behind. I hope that you like my choices!
I love how we can catch glimpses of Irish women’s lived experiences because sources from particular moments in their lives have survived the decades. Although this social history of letters written to the archbishop of Dublin is not specifically a women’s history book, many of those who wrote for help were women and so the book offers a glimpse of their often-difficult lives.
I love how Earner-Byrne privileges the ‘voices’ of letter writers in her book, exploring what they put in writing, as well as what they implied and their silences. I found this a very thought-provoking analysis, pushing me to think about the ways that people frame their narratives and how what they choose to include or exclude about their lives informs historians.
This innovative study of poverty in Independent Ireland between 1920 and 1940 is the first to place the poor at its core by exploring their own words and letters. Written to the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, their correspondence represents one of the few traces in history of Irish experiences of poverty, and collectively they illuminate the lives of so many during the foundation decades of the Irish state. This book keeps the human element central, so often lost when the framework of history is policy, institutions and legislation. It explores how ideas of charity, faith, gender, character and social status…
There is still so much to know about Irish girls’ and women’s lives, and I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to books that explore these themes, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I work as a historian and professor of Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. I love archival research and often find it really exciting to order a file or box in the archives or pull up a newspaper, not knowing what story it is going to tell or what insight I am going to get of an individual’s world in the written records left behind. I hope that you like my choices!
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…
From the ascent of Peter the Great to the Russian Revolution. From the Battle of the Boyne to the Easter Rising. Between these epochal events were two astounding centuries of war, diplomacy, intrigue, innovation and international radical political movements, the reverberations of which are still felt in both Ireland and the former territories of the Russian empire today.
In Anarchy and Authority, readers follow contemporaneous accounts of Irish men and women who ventured into the Russian empire during the long centuries of Romanov rule. Human connections, political intrigues, cultural cross-pollination mesh with sweeping historical narratives in the story of the…
There is still so much to know about Irish girls’ and women’s lives, and I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to books that explore these themes, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I work as a historian and professor of Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. I love archival research and often find it really exciting to order a file or box in the archives or pull up a newspaper, not knowing what story it is going to tell or what insight I am going to get of an individual’s world in the written records left behind. I hope that you like my choices!
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.
This is the first book to tackle the controversial history of prostitution in Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Maria Luddy uncovers the extent of prostitution in the country, how Irish women came to work as prostitutes, their living conditions and their treatment by society. She links discussions of prostitution to the Irish nationalist and suffrage movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, analysing the ways in which Irish nationalism used the problems of prostitution and venereal disease to argue for the withdrawal of the British from Ireland. She also investigates the contentious history of Magdalen…
A writer friend asked me, "If you could write about anything you wanted, what would that be?" I thought immediately of Sicily and then of women (and men) trying to break free from cultural definitions that have historically kept us in traditional roles of housewife, cook, and mother, or breadwinner and protector. Having choice and being able to carve one's path is paramount, a deeply held value for me, both as an individual woman and as a psychotherapist. The courage of some of my clients who have dared to follow their own paths, along with my challenge to steer my own path, were also inspirations for the books I chose.
Ellis Lacey, the protagonist of this book, embodies the spirit of both autonomy and connection that I hold as a core value.
Even as Ellis discovers herself and her sexuality in America, she doesn't lose her connection to family and Ireland. Besides, I love Colm Toibin's writing. I get the sense he understands women.
Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. The book that inspired the major motion picture starring Saoirse Ronan.
It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.
Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is…
I’ve been a history nut since junior high trips to prehistoric Indian Mounds in Ohio. I transcribed an early town settler’s diary as a high school project. Traveling with my Air Force hubby gave me a window into faraway places. Allan Eckert’s narrative history of pioneer times grabbed my imagination. My children would love these gripping tales of settler versus Shawnee, yet they’d never crack the two-inch thick volume. I tried writing historical fiction on their level by bringing a young protagonist into the story. I had no idea I’d follow that first book with eight more, delving into the history of various famous Ohioans.
I’m not a feminist and I don’t feel oppressed as a woman. But after reading this book, I’m glad that Elizabeth Cady Stanton hosted the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1858. The young protagonist, Bridie, has experienced some of the wrongs that Mrs. Stanton tries to put right. I enjoyed getting to know the famous activist through Bridie’s eyes. Bridie flees from a cruel master and finds work with “the strangest lady she’s ever met”. Mrs. Stanton comes across as a down-to-earth woman, not the crusader type at all. I laughed at the detail of the two young Stanton boys romping through the cabbages. Kudos to the author for including other events and issues for context—the Irish potato famine, poorhouses, the Free Soil Party, the Erie Canal, and the Underground Railroad. Young ladies will appreciate their privileges after reading this novel.
Celebrate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment with another historical novel about women's suffrage from the author of The Hope Chest!
Bridie's life has been a series of wrongs. The potato famine in Ireland. Being sent to the poorhouse when her mother's new job in America didn't turn out the way they'd hoped. Becoming an orphan.
And then there's the latest wrong--having to work for a family so abusive that Bridie is afraid she won't survive. So she runs away to Seneca Falls, New York, which in 1848 is a bustling town full of possibility. There, she makes friends with…
I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House, an interdisciplinary center devoted to the study of Irish history and culture. The key themes in my work—migration and diaspora—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
The “coffin ship” is a haunting metaphor for the catastrophe that struck Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s, when more than 1 million people died of starvation and disease and another 2 million people emigrated.
In this deeply researched and beautifully written book, Cian McMahon accomplishes two main goals. First, he disentangles the myth of the “coffin ship” from the reality. Shipboard mortality, he finds, was generally low, yet on some fully one-quarter of the passengers perishing in the worst cases.
Second, McMahon fills in a huge gap in emigration history—which usually explains why people leave home and then takes up the story again when they arrive in America—by showing how emigrants grappled with life and death on board ships and built community in the process.
Honorable Mention, Theodore Saloutos Book Award, given by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society
A vivid, new portrait of Irish migration through the letters and diaries of those who fled their homeland during the Great Famine
The standard story of the exodus during Ireland's Great Famine is one of tired cliches, half-truths, and dry statistics. In The Coffin Ship, a groundbreaking work of transnational history, Cian T. McMahon offers a vibrant, fresh perspective on an oft-ignored but vital component of the migration experience: the journey itself.
Between 1845 and 1855, over two million people fled Ireland to escape the Great…
My first novel Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain was a collage novel; an interweaving of several voices in order to create a composite portrait of the city of Salisbury, which told several stories as a way of revealing more of the life of that place. Since then I’ve written three more novels, all of them interested in the effects of using different voices to tell different parts of the story. I think that polyphony makes for great books, and these are four examples of that—different ways of weaving multiple tales together.
Let The Great World Spinorbits around Philip Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in New York in 1974; an amazing feat that has, of course, only become more charged and potent with time. The novel creates a kaleidoscope of lives touched by that breathtaking act, as well as capturing, in heartstopping prose, the magnitude of the act itself.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Colum McCann’s beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House, an interdisciplinary center devoted to the study of Irish history and culture. The key themes in my work—migration and diaspora—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
In Hereafter, Vona Groarke accomplishes what most historians can never hope to do.
Filling in the gaps and silences in the historical record with poetry, prose, and imagery, she recreates the interior world of an Irish domestic servant in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century—her transatlantic migration, her back-and-forth journeys to Ireland, her working conditions and family life, and her hopes, dreams, and frustrations.
A work of great imaginative power and empathy, Hereafter is also a profound meditation on the historian’s craft.
A lyrical portrait of a young Irish woman reinventing herself at the turn of the twentieth century in America
Ellen O'Hara was a young immigrant from Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century who, with courage and resilience, made a life for herself in New York while financially supporting those at home. Hereafter is her story, told by Vona Groarke, her descendant, in a beautiful blend of poetry, prose, and history.
In July 1882, Ellen O'Hara stepped off a ship from the West of Ireland to begin a new life in New York. What she encountered was a world…
I write and teach about nineteenth-century US history, and I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House. The key themes in my work—migration, diaspora, and empire—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
Thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and deeply humane, Expelling the Poor shows how poverty—and Irish poverty in particular—shaped American immigration policy.
Until the late nineteenth century, Hidetaka Hirota demonstrates, individual states and cities controlled their own borders. They regulated, taxed, excluded, and removed the Irish poor, thereby laying the groundwork for the national policy that emerged in the 1880s.
By examining the impact of nativist sentiment, Hirota reveals how policies directed at the Irish-born poor, alongside the exclusion of Chinese laborers, explain the origins of immigration policy in the United States.
Expelling the Poor examines the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially deportation policy. Based on an analysis of immigration policies in major American coastal states, including New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, and California, it provides the first sustained study of immigration control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal immigration law in the late nineteenth century. The influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century led nativists in New York and Massachusetts to develop policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident in the…
