Ireland awakening. Edward Rutherfurd. 2006.

Ireland Awakening takes the story of Ireland from the seventeenth century onwards. It picks up at the Reformation and onto the devastating arrival of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell heralds the inauguration  of two hundred years of Protestant dominance, throughout which many of the Irish people are impoverished and dispossessed. Dublin is made a Protestant capital, and Catholics become an underclass.

Set against the dramatic backdrop of Irish political history, the novel revisits family dynasties such as the Walsh’s and the Doyles, whose epic voyages through the centuries continue right the way up to the twentieth century’s Easter Rising and Independence, passing through turbulent milestones such as The Year of the French and The Home Rule Movement of Parnell along the way. But the literature does not entirely give way to history, the emergence of the Celtic Dawn and the timeless worlds of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce also enter the story in unexpected ways, and bring this powerful saga to its conclusion.