A masterful story of the legacy inherited by the descendants of those who suffered historic wrongs.

Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way
ELAINE FEENEY

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Should you be lucky enough to find yourself in a pub in the west of Ireland as the sun goes down and the music begins, it won’t be long before every voice is raised, singing “The Fields of Athenry”. It’s an irresistible melody, but the story it tells is of a prisoner bound for Botany Bay, transported for stealing corn and rebelling “against the famine and the crown”.

Elaine Feeney’s third novel covers three generations of life in Athenry, her own home town. The central character, and at times the narrator, is Claire O’Connor, whose great-grandparents had remembered the cruelties endured during that Great Hunger, when useless roads leading nowhere had to be built by starving people simply to “earn” the soup which kept them alive.

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