Books like Letters of the Catholic Poor — picked by fans

Set in 1975, Louise Kennedy’s novel deals with some themes particular to Northern Ireland and its sectarian characteristics, such as the challenges of navigating conversational and attitudinal hurdles when engaging with someone from the ‘other’ community and the travails of undertaking ‘everyday’ tasks against the invasive background of the security situation. 

However, I liked that the work also dealt with wider issues, such as differences in expectations and behavior in rural and urban settings and the impact that class and education may have on social interactions. I enjoyed the novel both as a love story between the young Catholic barmaid and the older married Protestant lawyer (who doesn’t like a love story?) but also as an observational analysis of the conditions in Northern Ireland at the time and their sad outworkings on the lives of people only peripherally involved in the politics of that society.   

I don’t know how much I knew of nineteenth-century Ireland when I first read this book as a child, but I certainly wanted to know a whole lot more after reading it. And after years of researching and teaching nineteenth-century Irish history, I still love this book!

This is a wonderfully written and extremely moving account of Irish emigration to the US in the nineteenth century, as told by (fictional) teenager Peggy O’Driscoll. It is the second in a trilogy, which includes the more well-known Under the Hawthorn Tree about the Great Irish Famine. I love them all, but this one was always my favorite, following the challenges and adventures that Peggy had in the ‘new world.’

I enjoy dipping in and out of books that bring to the fore, for the first time, collective stories of diverse Irish women. Two stand out for me in 2024. Angela Byrne’s very readable Anarchy and authority focuses on the Irish in Russia from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.

I love how she is so creative with seemingly mundane or silent sources, like a list of visitors to the mountain town of Spa (in modern-day Belgium), using it to illuminate relationships and weave together very different lives. But Byrne is also honest about the historian’s challenges and her frustrations when the archives refuse to confirm in writing her hunches about what happened.

I am currently fascinated by the extraordinary women’s histories in Clodagh Finn and John Morgan’s The Irish in the Resistance: The Untold Stories of the Ordinary Heroes who Resisted Hitler. Neither of these books… show more.

Maria Luddy is one of the pioneers of Irish women’s history. I love this book because it was one of the first to focus in such a specific way on women and crime/deviancy in the Irish past, paving the way for subsequent research in this field over the past two decades.

The author uses sources found in archives and libraries to offer glimpses of the experiences of women who sold sex in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland and the world in which they lived. The historical context is very well developed, with assessments of annual statistical returns, reports of hospitals and other institutions, and analysis of contemporary attitudes. It is an impressively detailed book, but is also very readable and is a go-to for those of us researching Irish women and crime.

Peter Singer has been called “the most influential living philosopher”, and his writing certainly influenced the trajectory of my own life (including leading me to care a lot about the excruciating suffering that farm animals and other animals are made to endure).

He has a lot of good books, but this one drives home, in a very simple and down-to-earth fashion, how you and I can literally save lives.

I have a soft spot for women during times of war or adversity. This story spans the early years of the 1900s as Maggie lives her father’s legacy to “make a difference in the world.” She never gives in, or gives up, and contributes to the safety of those around her during the end of the Great War and troubles in Ireland. Setting is a big thing for me, and in this book the location, the surroundings, and the times evoked an understanding of Ireland and the Irish. As with the fictional characters I like most, Maggie is a person I’d love to have as a friend.

This book is a thrilling mystery wrapped in vivid detail. The readers’ hearts go out to Cora as she struggles to make sense of what her village leaders have always taught about their god, the Winter King. I admire how she never stops seeking to learn the truth the religious leaders are hiding from their people despite insurmountable odds. It is a powerful warning about trusting only what a small group of people say about God versus examining the scriptures yourself. No doubt Cohen was inspired by times in church history before the Reformation.

I’m a sucker for a Southern gothic page-turner, particularly one that features such a complicated character like Joe Ransom who, when you first meet him, you don’t know if you should approach or just run away. Then bring teenage Gary into the mix with his troubled family backstory and this sheds a new light on Joe, and Gary as well, as the two traverse the muddy path to redemption.

Brown’s descriptive prose paints a harsh picture of the world, warts and all, yet it also has an underlying tragic beauty. 

In The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer makes the case that we can do a tremendous amount of good by donating to high-impact charities. Every year, hundreds of thousands of children die from preventable diseases, and at little cost to ourselves, we can make an enormous positive difference by giving to organizations like the Against Malaria Foundation. 

If you want to get a taste of what life is like in a Rio favela, then this is the book for you. Based on years of meticulous fieldwork, Goldstein documents the hardships endured by a woman she befriended who works as a maid for a wealthy family in the city. More importantly, however, Goldstein’s book describes in detail how life in a Rio favela changed as violence associated with the drug trade overwhelms the community. When she began her fieldwork, in the early 1990s, Rio was enjoying a period of relative calm. By the end of the 90s, however, Goldstein could no longer risk visiting her friends for fear of her own personal safety.