The most recommended books on the Great Famine in Ireland

Who picked these books? Meet our 15 experts.

15 authors created a book list connected to the Great Famine in Ireland, and here are their favorite Great Famine in Ireland books.
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Book cover of The Hungry Road

D.J. Adamson Author Of Admit to Mayhem

From D.J.'s 3 favorite reads in 2023.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Curious

D.J.'s 3 favorite reads in 2023

D.J. Adamson Why did D.J. love this book?

I loved Leon Uris's novel Trinity, which tells the story of Ireland's potato blight. That book has never left my memory. The Hungry Road brings Uris's novel back to memory with its account of the 1845 period.

It offers three perspectives: Mary Sullivan's dreams for a better future, Dr. Donovan's attempts to help the desperate and starving, and Father John Fitzpatrick, who finds his faith tested. Offering these complex and powerful characters, Conlon-McKenna brings the terror of this period to light. It is a great read!

By Marita Conlon-McKenna,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Hungry Road as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The No.1 bestselling novel of the Great Irish Famine from one of Ireland's most beloved writers

Ireland's hopes for freedom are dashed with the arrival of a deadly potato blight that strikes terror in the heart of its people.

1845. Seamstress Mary Sullivan's dreams of a better future are shattered as she looks out over their ruined crop. Refusing to give in to despair, she must use every ounce of courage and strength to protect her family as they fight to survive.

Dr Dan Donovan is Medical Officer to the Skibbereen Union. The arrival of 'The Hunger' soon brings starving…


Book cover of Star of the Sea

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated by "sea stories" since I could read, maybe before. I was born in Liverpool, my dad was in the navy, my family ran an 18th-century inn named the Turk’s Head after a nautical knot, and I’ve directed or written more than twenty films, plays, and novels with the sea as their setting. But they’re not really about the sea. For me, the sea is a mirror to reflect the human condition, a theatre for all the human dramas I can imagine. More importantly, I’ve read over a hundred sea stories for research and pleasure, and those I’ve chosen for you are the five I liked best.

Seth's book list on books about the sea that aren’t just about sailing on it, or fighting on it, or drowning in it, but are really about the human condition

Seth Hunter Why did Seth love this book?

I love this story because, for me, it’s a perfect example of why a ship is such a great platform for storytelling, a moving stage for a compelling cast of characters to act out the drama of their past and present lives while heading into an uncertain future.

The Star of the Sea is a "coffin ship," the name given to the leaking hulks that transported a million emigrants from Ireland to America during the Great Famine of the 1840s.

It’s a historical novel but for me, a timeless story about emigration and the human condition, of refugees fleeing the monsters of their past, war, famine, disease, whatever, into what they hope will be a brighter future, and of what happens to them on the way.

By Joseph O'Connor,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Star of the Sea as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 14, 15, 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

* Over a million copies sold *

Rediscover Joseph O'Connor's monumental #1 international bestseller.

In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster, the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York.

On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees. Among them are a maidservant with a devastating secret, bankrupt Lord Merridith and his family, an aspiring novelist and a maker of revolutionary ballads, all braving the Atlantic in search of a new home. Each is connected more deeply than they can possibly know.

But a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks, hungry for…


Book cover of Atlas of the Great Irish Famine

Frank Parker Author Of A Purgatory of Misery: How Victorian Liberals Turned a Crisis into a Disaster

From my list on helping you understand the Irish potato famine.

Why am I passionate about this?

A friend with Parkinson's Disease requested my help in his attempts to understand the famine and its impact on his ancestors in County Clare. Once I began reading the material he brought me I was impelled to discover more. I had already researched and written about an earlier period in Irish history - the Anglo-Norman invasion - and it seemed that everything that happened on both sides of the Irish Sea in the centuries that followed was instrumental in making the famine such a disaster. Our book is the result.

Frank's book list on helping you understand the Irish potato famine

Frank Parker Why did Frank love this book?

This product of intensive research by members of the Department of Geography at Cork University covers every aspect of the famine as experienced by the people who lived and died through it.

Lavishly illustrated with maps and facsimiles of actual documents it details everything from the design and administration of workhouses to the treatment of migrants upon arrival in Canada, the USA, and Australia. No other book provides such an eloquent and devastating narrative of the suffering experienced by Irish people during the period 1845-52.

Devoid of rhetoric, it displays the facts in easy-to-understand text and statistical analysis, enhanced with first-hand eye-witness accounts from letters and journal extracts.

By John Crowley (editor), William J. Smyth (editor), Mike Murphy (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Atlas of the Great Irish Famine as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Best Reference Books of 2012 presented by Library Journal

The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish history, with implications that cannot be underestimated. Over a million people perished between 1845-1852, and well over a million others fled to other locales within Europe and America. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The 2000 US census had 41 million people claim Irish ancestry, or one in five white Americans. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (1845-52) considers how such a near total decimation of…


Book cover of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

Zhang-Yue Zhou Author Of Achieving Food Security in China: The Challenges Ahead

From my list on understanding China’s great famine.

Why am I passionate about this?

My desire for food-related studies originates from my personal experience of starvation. Born in 1957 in rural China, I soon stepped into China’s Great Famine (1958-1962). During this famine, over 30 million people died of hunger, mostly peasants, including my grandpa (my mother’s father). As a growing child, I was hungry and today I still remember how my family struggled to feed us. After becoming a student at an agricultural university, I had the opportunity to think and started to ponder over food-related issues. After graduation, I became an academic and have since focused my energy on studies concerning food, chiefly, China’s food supply and food security. 

Zhang-Yue's book list on understanding China’s great famine

Zhang-Yue Zhou Why did Zhang-Yue love this book?

I was shocked when I first came to know this book, the first to unravel the large-scale abnormal death during China’s Great Famine. I was shocked because it was written by a person who was foreign to China and was far away from the famine, not by a person who was from China or someone who lived through the famine.

Also shocking are the book’s many revelations; the most important of which is that the Great Famine was man-made, not due to natural disasters as the Chinese regime always told us.

As a result, this book greatly inspired me to look into the causes and consequences of the famine and how to improve China’s food security to avoid future famines.

By Jasper Becker,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Hungry Ghosts as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Combining years of interviews, extensive research, and painstaking detective work, a journalist exposes the horrible result of Mao Zedong's attempted utopian engineering in China between 1958 and 1962, uncovering a bloody trail of terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder.


Book cover of The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years

Zhang-Yue Zhou Author Of Achieving Food Security in China: The Challenges Ahead

From my list on understanding China’s great famine.

Why am I passionate about this?

My desire for food-related studies originates from my personal experience of starvation. Born in 1957 in rural China, I soon stepped into China’s Great Famine (1958-1962). During this famine, over 30 million people died of hunger, mostly peasants, including my grandpa (my mother’s father). As a growing child, I was hungry and today I still remember how my family struggled to feed us. After becoming a student at an agricultural university, I had the opportunity to think and started to ponder over food-related issues. After graduation, I became an academic and have since focused my energy on studies concerning food, chiefly, China’s food supply and food security. 

Zhang-Yue's book list on understanding China’s great famine

Zhang-Yue Zhou Why did Zhang-Yue love this book?

Numerous studies have confirmed that China’s Great Famine was man-made, its architect Mao Zedong. Yet, many of those affected do not blame Mao for what happened to them.

Still, in today’s China, many, including those affected by the catastrophe, worship Mao. The presence of such a ludicrous act is attributed to the communist regime’s mythicizing Mao and meantime censoring any media exposing Mao’s immense cruelties.

This book by Chen helps uncover and make explicit the testimonies of those involved in the human catastrophe. The book also exposes testimonies concerning political violence before and after the famine, which is very beneficial for one to ponder over why political violence and man-made tragedies recur in contemporary China and whether China by itself is capable of ensuring similar tragedies never again occur.

By Lingchei Letty Chen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Great Leap Backward as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

It is now forty years after Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, and more than fifty years since the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine. During this time, the collective memory of these events has been sanitized, reduced to a much-diluted version of what truly took place. Historical and sociological approaches cannot fully address the moral failure that allowed the atrocities of the Mao era to take place. Humanist approaches, such as literary criticism, have a central role to play in uncovering and making explicit the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators in “memory writing”…


Book cover of A Slip of a Girl

Susan Krawitz Author Of Viva, Rose!

From my list on middle grade that makes history leap off the page.

Why am I passionate about this?

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.” Frederic Raphael. When I was a child, a relative often told stories of a cowboy gear clad cousin who visited our New York family from Texas and claimed he’d once served in Pancho Villa’s army. These tales were the spark that eventually led to Viva, Rose! and my interest in storytelling as well. There’s something about the combination of lived experience and fiction that I find irresistibly engaging and exciting. I’ve worked as a journalist, ghostwriter, and editor, but my happiest happy place is writing and reading stories birthed from a molten core of real life.

Susan's book list on middle grade that makes history leap off the page

Susan Krawitz Why did Susan love this book?

I’m a bit of a Celtophile but hadn’t heard of the Irish Land Wars of the early 1800s before encountering this book. In short: after The Great Famine, poor crop yields forced tenant farmers into a desperate fight to stay on farmland owned by absentee owners. Anna, the book’s protagonist, isn’t a typical mighty-girl heroine, but has a fierce love for her family, and the farm that was theirs long before their landlord claimed it. The author offers her story in perfect verse, weaving in bits of her family’s own history and historic photos as well. Anna’s a girl who knew what she wanted and never stopped believing it could and should be hers until it was. That’s a lesson all children, including this grown one, can really, really use.

By Patricia Reilly Giff,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Slip of a Girl as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 10, 11, 12, and 13.

What is this book about?

A heart-wrenching novel in verse about a poor girl surviving the Irish Land Wars, by a two-time Newbery Honor-winning author.

For Anna, the family farm has always been home... But now, things are changing.

Anna's mother has died, and her older siblings have emigrated, leaving Anna and her father to care for a young sister with special needs. And though their family has worked this land for years, they're in danger of losing it as poor crop yields leave them without money to pay their rent.

When a violent encounter with the Lord's rent collector results in Anna and her…


Book cover of The Great Famine: Ireland's Agony 1845-1852

Frank Parker Author Of A Purgatory of Misery: How Victorian Liberals Turned a Crisis into a Disaster

From my list on helping you understand the Irish potato famine.

Why am I passionate about this?

A friend with Parkinson's Disease requested my help in his attempts to understand the famine and its impact on his ancestors in County Clare. Once I began reading the material he brought me I was impelled to discover more. I had already researched and written about an earlier period in Irish history - the Anglo-Norman invasion - and it seemed that everything that happened on both sides of the Irish Sea in the centuries that followed was instrumental in making the famine such a disaster. Our book is the result.

Frank's book list on helping you understand the Irish potato famine

Frank Parker Why did Frank love this book?

Where the Atlas is a very large book compiled by a team of academics, O'Murchadha's smaller volume covers much the same ground.

He provides some context by opening with a portrait of Ireland before the onset of famine and concluding with a picture of Ireland in the years after. It is made human by the many anecdotes featuring the experiences of particular individulals and families from his native County Clare.

O'Murchadha is highly critical of the government's response to the famine, offering scathing critiques of the Poor Law, the Rate-In-Aid Act, and the beaurocratisation of relief, nevertheless his tone is generally well balanced. I regard both the Atlas and O'Murchada's book as essential reading for anyone with a genuine interest in understanding this watershed period in British-Irish relations.

By Ciaran O Murchadha,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Great Famine as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This is an engaging and moving account of this most destructive event in Irish history. Over one million people died in the Great Famine, and more than one million more emigrated on the coffin ships to America and beyond. Drawing on contemporary eyewitness accounts and diaries, the book charts the arrival of the potato blight in 1845 and the total destruction of the harvests in 1846 which brought a sense of numbing shock to the populace. Far from meeting the relief needs of the poor, the Liberal public works programme was a first example of how relief policies would themselves…


Book cover of Life Sentences

Anne Griffin Author Of Listening Still

From my list on Irish books by Irish authors I like to rave about.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love great writing and great storytelling too. As a child I liked nothing more than when my father made up bedtime stories for me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how writers work exceptionally hard not just at getting the plot of a story right but in the words they chose. Being Irish, I love to support the wealth of enviably good writers that seem to spill out from these shores. In each of these books you will find love and loss and laughter. It never fails to make me smile when abroad to see one of these guys on the shelves of the bookshops I visit. 

Anne's book list on Irish books by Irish authors I like to rave about

Anne Griffin Why did Anne love this book?

Set over three generations of the one family, this is the story of their fight for survival. What I love here is not just the prose, because there is no one finer than O’Callaghan, but also because it touches on the depopulation of Ireland’s small islands during the famine and the small island to which he refers has a very significant family connection for me. Partly based on O’Callaghan’s own family, Life Sentences tells an epic story of working-class life in Ireland from famine right through to modern-day. It is an unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, and reconciliation.

By Billy O'Callaghan,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Life Sentences as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

*THE #3 IRISH BESTSELLER*
*A SINEAD & RICK 'MUST READS' PICK*

An unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, hunger and redemption, from a rising star of Irish fiction

'O'Callaghan is one of our finest writers . . . and this is his best work yet' JOHN BANVILLE

*****

At just sixteen, Nancy leaves the small island of Cape Clear for the mainland, the only member of her family to survive the effects of the Great Famine. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she is irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love…


Book cover of Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine, 1958-1962: An Oral History

Zhang-Yue Zhou Author Of Achieving Food Security in China: The Challenges Ahead

From my list on understanding China’s great famine.

Why am I passionate about this?

My desire for food-related studies originates from my personal experience of starvation. Born in 1957 in rural China, I soon stepped into China’s Great Famine (1958-1962). During this famine, over 30 million people died of hunger, mostly peasants, including my grandpa (my mother’s father). As a growing child, I was hungry and today I still remember how my family struggled to feed us. After becoming a student at an agricultural university, I had the opportunity to think and started to ponder over food-related issues. After graduation, I became an academic and have since focused my energy on studies concerning food, chiefly, China’s food supply and food security. 

Zhang-Yue's book list on understanding China’s great famine

Zhang-Yue Zhou Why did Zhang-Yue love this book?

This book records the memories of the devastation and loss of the famine survivors, providing grass-root evidence of the man-made catastrophe.

Zhou traveled to many provinces to search and interview the survivors, with a focus on nine that were worst hit by the famine. It is emotionally hard for a survivor to recall past miseries. It is even harder, indeed emotionally traumatizing, for a researcher to go through many miseries of the survivors to get this book compiled. I admire her courage and resilience. 

By Zhou Xun,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine, 1958-1962 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A powerful account of China's Great Famine as told through the voices of those who survived it

In 1958, China's revered leader Mao Zedong instituted a program designed to transform his giant nation into a Communist utopia. Called the Great Leap Forward, Mao's grand scheme-like so many other utopian dreams of the 20th century-proved a monumental disaster, resulting in the mass destruction of China's agriculture, industry, and trade while leaving large portions of the countryside forever scarred by man-made environmental disasters. The resulting three-year famine claimed the lives of more than 45 million people in China. In this remarkable oral…


Book cover of Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1850

Frank Parker Author Of A Purgatory of Misery: How Victorian Liberals Turned a Crisis into a Disaster

From my list on helping you understand the Irish potato famine.

Why am I passionate about this?

A friend with Parkinson's Disease requested my help in his attempts to understand the famine and its impact on his ancestors in County Clare. Once I began reading the material he brought me I was impelled to discover more. I had already researched and written about an earlier period in Irish history - the Anglo-Norman invasion - and it seemed that everything that happened on both sides of the Irish Sea in the centuries that followed was instrumental in making the famine such a disaster. Our book is the result.

Frank's book list on helping you understand the Irish potato famine

Frank Parker Why did Frank love this book?

This is the book to read if you are young or seeking something for a young reader.

The suffering and endurance of ordinary men women and children during those terrible years is described with empathy and admiration. It is also, as the book description states, "the story of the heroes among the Irish people and how they held on to hope."

By Susan Campbell Bartoletti,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Black Potatoes as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 12, 13, 14, and 15.

What is this book about?

2002 Sibert Medal Winner

In 1845, a disaster struck Ireland. Overnight, a mysterious blight attacked the potato crops, turning the potatoes black and destroying the only real food of nearly six million people.

Over the next five years, the blight attacked again and again. These years are known today as the Great Irish Famine, a time when one million people died from starvation and disease and two million more fled their homeland.
Black Potatoes is the compelling story of men, women, and children who defied landlords and searched empty fields for scraps of harvested vegetables and edible weeds to eat,…


Book cover of The Hungry Road
Book cover of Star of the Sea
Book cover of Atlas of the Great Irish Famine

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