THE BOOKS
One family, from Black '47 to the end of the Second World War. Their story comes to you in eight Books, twelve letters each, one letter a month. Each Book covers roughly a dozen years and hands the pen to the next keeper of the family's correspondence, so the voice grows older and changes as the century turns.
You can begin at the beginning, in the Famine, or start with the era your own family lived through. Every Book stands on its own, and together they run unbroken from the first parting to the last homecoming.
Read the story behind the letters, or start below.
It opens with an American wake, the send-off held the night before Seán O'Donnell sails for New York, a farewell that everyone knows is likely forever. His mother Brigid begins the letters, writing through Black '47, the workhouses, and the first "American money" home. The darkest chapter, told with care.
Read Book One →Neighbours follow Seán's path west, and the news from America turns to war. A Ballycastle man marches with the Irish Brigade; the Draft Riots reach the parish as a frightened letter; and a cable laid under the ocean suddenly brings word across in a day instead of weeks. Nora takes up the pen.
Read Book Two →The Land War begins in Mayo, on the family's own doorstep. Michael writes to his cousin in New York from the middle of it: the meetings, the evictions resisted, and the affair at Lough Mask that gave the world a new word, "boycott." A quiet farm at the centre of a country waking up.
Read Book Three →Tenants begin to buy the land they farmed for generations. A parish GAA club takes the field. The Gaelic League opens its first classes, and Parnell rises and falls in a single black-bordered decade. Ireland is finding a voice, and the family is finding its feet.
Read Book Four →Delia, born into a steadier Ireland, picks up the correspondence as a young woman. She writes of feiseanna and Irish classes, a first cousin's visit home from New York, and the Wyndham Act that finally turns tenants into owners. The old century closes; a new one opens with the Abbey Theatre and a new politics stirring.
Read Book Five →The steadiest years give way to the hardest. The Rising and its executions divide the fireside; the Somme takes the parish's own; and the Spanish flu reaches Ballycastle in the same autumn the war ends. Delia's letters carry a family's fear for the men who enlisted and the ones who did not come back.
Read Book Six →A first Dáil, the Black and Tans, the Truce, the Treaty, and a Civil War that sets neighbours against each other. Nora Óg takes the pen and writes through the birth of a state to the boy in New York who will carry the family's story into its final Book.
Read Book Seven →Ireland becomes Éire and declares its neutrality, and the war comes close anyway, in the Belfast Blitz and the bombs on Dublin. Then Pearl Harbor, and James Ryan ships out in an American uniform. The last letters wait for word of him. He comes home safe, a hundred years after Brigid first wrote to Seán.
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