Ireland: Awakening

by EdwardRutherfurd (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $10.11

  Following the critically acclaimed success of Dublin , this riveting sequel takes the story of Ireland from the 17th century onwards. Ireland: Awakenings picks up where the former left off - at the Reformation, and with it, the devastating arrival of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell heralds the inauguration of two hundred years of Protestant dominance, throughout which many of the Irish people were 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 Walshes 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 Independence Movement of Parnell along the way. But literature does not entirely give way to history; the encroaching of the Celtic Dawn and the timeless worlds of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce are also paid rich tribute to, and bring this powerful saga to its conclusion.

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $15.97

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $4.22

  Rutherfurd's epic style, famously exercised in his dramatic accounts of Sarum, Russia and London, makes this saga, set against the backdrop of the great events of Irish history, so readable and moving. With the help of some of the country's leading historians, Rutherfurd has unearthed many curious gems that overturn our traditionally perceived notions of Ireland's past: - There were significant numbers of English people in early Ireland - they were actually slaves to the Irish Patrick was not a name the Irish ever used until modern times. For centuries, the saint's name was held in such reverence that the Irish would only call themselves Gilpatrick, which means 'servant of Patrick'. It was the one and only English Pope who first told the English King to conquer Christian Ireland in the Middle Ages. St Stephen's Green is the well-known centre of fashionable Dublin and is named after a small leper hospital that used to be there; Leopardstown racecourse is so-called because the land it is on also belonged to a leper hospital. The people in Ireland who most hated the Reformation were actually the English in Ireland, who were the strictest Catholics at that time.

• New

  Paperback
  2005

  $14.11

  Edward Rutherfurd's great Irish epic reveals the story of the people of Ireland through the focal point of the island's capital city. The epic begins in pre-Christian Ireland during the reign of the fierce and powerful High Kings at Tara, with the tale of two lovers, the princely Conall and the ravishing Deirdre, whose travails echo the ancient Celtic legend of Cuchulainn. From this stirring beginning, Rutherfurd takes the reader on a graphically realised journey through the centuries. Through the interlocking stories of a powerfully-imagined cast of characters - druids and chieftains, monks and smugglers, merchants and mercenaries, noblewomen, rebels and cowards - we see Ireland through the lens of its greatest city.