Historical Novels

Mary Bentham, a young woman from a small mid-western town, experiences a growing awareness of a larger world when she enters university. Her passage during her college years through the emotionally charged times of the mid-’60s—with civil rights battles in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy, and the emergence of Senator Eugene McCarthy as a standard-bearer of the anti-War movement that was to become a major political force as the death toll in Vietnam continued to rise—culminates in close encounters with efforts to suppress dissent during the riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 19

In the 1840s, the Great Potato Famine struck Ireland. As fields of potatoes began to yield only shriveling inedible black tubers, landlords began to drive thousands of starving peasants from their land. Brothers Tadhg and Fionn O’Brien, were living on a tenant farm when the black plague took their family’s meager crop. Their father and mother each died of the “famine fever,” and the brothers were separated and left to fend for themselves. Steeped in Irish legends and Gaelic traditions inculcated in them by their beloved Popa, the young Tadhg adopted whatever means necessary to survive, and ultimately emigrated to America. His older brother Fionn sought to defend his homeland and fight for the cause of Irish Independence.