Joseph McLaughlin, Irish born and bred, stands at his wife’s hillside grave in August 1846. For the first time in ten years he is glad she is dead. He knows the potato crop, their lifeblood, will soon be decimated by blight yet again. There is only one way his family might survive the hunger that will inevitably sweep Ireland; he must send his teenage daughters – Kit and Maeve – to America with his two tenant farming families, freeing up his tiny farm holding and reducing the number of mouths to be fed to just himself and his young son Eugene.
Kit is heart-broken at having to leave behind not only her family but also her young lover Ruarie O’Connor, the boy her sister Maeve had secretly loved since childhood.
Sad at the loss of her secret love, and angry with her father, Maeve sets off for America with the unscrupulous Gerald Flynn and his wife. But in Liverpool he robs Maeve and leaves her for dead. Believing her driver has run the poor girl down, Lady Sophie Jenison nurses Maeve back to health at their imposing country estate. Feigning amnesia, Maeve becomes a ward of the childless couple and the subject of much attention from the licentious Lord Charles Jenison.
With his family divided, Joseph and his son Eugene struggle to continue working their small farm holding in Ireland while Kit and the O’Dohertys endure a horrendous voyage to Boston on the coffin ship, Coral Rose, where Kit is raped by odious sailor Cormac Mulcahy.
When they finally reach America, Kit loves Boston and soon finds happiness of sorts, working with elderly Samuel Hobson who trains her to be a farrier, like her father. But when she discovers she is pregnant, she is faced with the fear that the baby could be Mulcahy’s, not Ruarie’s. Whatever the answer, she knows she must return to Ireland to find her family, and the truth.
Check Out What Readers Said about Kindle/eBook!
“It’s the kind of book you can’t put down and when you reach the end you are looking for more. I hope the author writes book two as It is well written and you find yourself becoming emotionally involved with the characters and I would like to see the next chapter of their lives” By JSM
“I truly could not put this book down. I felt such pity and sympathy for all of the characters . Life was so harsh for the Irish and still is I imagine . Not since Angela’s ashe’s , have I read a story of such tragedy and courage.” By RAMONA ESTRADA
Kit is heart-broken at having to leave behind not only her family but also her young lover Ruarie O’Connor, the boy her sister Maeve had secretly loved since childhood.
