cover image The Hungry Earth

The Hungry Earth

Sean Kenny. Roberts Rinehart Publishers, $19.95 (262pp) ISBN 978-1-57098-136-4

Easily the single most traumatic event suffered by the Irish people, the Great Famine of the 1840s was nearly written out of the history books by the citizens of the nascent Irish republic, who collectively wished to forget so horrific a past. Yet it recurs in Irish history and literature like a nightmare, its ghastly particulars intact. In an interesting example of Ireland's current reevaluation of its past, Kenny's heartfelt but occasionally clumsy first novel explores the ancestral guilt that plagues the Irish to this day. Turlough Walsh is an obnoxious, self-centered accountant from Dublin who inherits a cottage in the West of Ireland. Through a series of disturbing time-warps, he begins to experience the Famine firsthand. He gets to know the family who lived on the land where his cottage stands, and he is moved to help them (in the past), and to make their plight known (in the present). To do this, he quits his job and takes on a mission that will bring to light the agricultural accidents (or atrocities) that killed one million people and drove another million from their homeland. For any reader who takes an interest in the subject, this is a spirited, well-researched but polemical introduction to a tale that has yet to be fully told. (July)