God that cover.

Irony of being a middle-aged middle-class Irishman living in the 21st century and trying to lose a bit of weight while reading about people starving in the 19th century. It's not even the Great Hunger, it's one of the earlier famines of 1826. Oh good lord. This is my history, our legacy. We cry into our whiskey and curse the sassenach and the treachery of our fellow Irishmen and lament the great suffering and the appalling injustice, which were a byword for backward and repressive agrarian policies.

Before we get to the famine, though, there's the life of Dualta Duane, who flees Galway after knocking a landlord's son off his horse. Fired by anger at the general awfulness of landlordism, he dabbles in rural agitation, but finds at the end he has no stomach for wanton destruction and murder even in a good cause. He settles in a Clare valley, but tithes and rents and gale days and cronyism and corruption squeezing the poor unmercifully, trouble is never very far away, despite the best efforts of the great Liberator, Daniel O'Connell, who strides the land like a behemoth, driving the country towards Emancipation and Repeal.

Dualta is an engaging and likable hero, his decency and good nature sorely tested by his times. will he survive? Will his family? Will anyone? The last few chapters are a guided tour of hell, but Macken is sure-footed and clear-eyed and guides us through the grief and horror to the point where there can be a future again, however frail.