Here are 100 books that On Canaan's Side fans have personally recommended if you like
On Canaan's Side.
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I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House, an interdisciplinary center devoted to the study of Irish history and culture. The key themes in my work—migration and diaspora—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
In Hereafter, Vona Groarke accomplishes what most historians can never hope to do.
Filling in the gaps and silences in the historical record with poetry, prose, and imagery, she recreates the interior world of an Irish domestic servant in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century—her transatlantic migration, her back-and-forth journeys to Ireland, her working conditions and family life, and her hopes, dreams, and frustrations.
A work of great imaginative power and empathy, Hereafter is also a profound meditation on the historian’s craft.
A lyrical portrait of a young Irish woman reinventing herself at the turn of the twentieth century in America
Ellen O'Hara was a young immigrant from Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century who, with courage and resilience, made a life for herself in New York while financially supporting those at home. Hereafter is her story, told by Vona Groarke, her descendant, in a beautiful blend of poetry, prose, and history.
In July 1882, Ellen O'Hara stepped off a ship from the West of Ireland to begin a new life in New York. What she encountered was a world…
Jo Jackson believes she has put behind her difficult childhood with a charismatic but sometimes violent father. One day, however, out of the blue, she is moved to write about him. Immediately she comes unstuck, face to face with things that don't add up, and a growing sense of mystery…
A friend with Parkinson's Disease requested my help in his attempts to understand the famine and its impact on his ancestors in County Clare. Once I began reading the material he brought me I was impelled to discover more. I had already researched and written about an earlier period in Irish history - the Anglo-Norman invasion - and it seemed that everything that happened on both sides of the Irish Sea in the centuries that followed was instrumental in making the famine such a disaster. Our book is the result.
This is a book for members of the Irish diaspora. It tells of the experiences of your ancestors as they fled the conditions prevailing in their homeland.
Often single members of families whose objective was to earn money they could send back to Ireland in order to enable those family members left behind to follow. Too often the welcome they found, after travelling in appalling conditions as human cargo in ships unsuitable for the purpose, was not as warm as they had expected.
A story relevant today as we grapple with the problems created by modern migration from war- and/or famine-ravaged areas of the modern world, often still undertaken in unsuitable boats.
Between 1845 and 1855, 2 million Irish men and women fled their famine-ravaged homeland, many to settle in large British and American cities that were already wrestling with a complex array of urban problems. In this innovative work of comparative urban history, Matthew Gallman looks at how two cities, Philadelphia and Liverpool, met the challenges raised by the influx of immigrants. Gallman examines how citizens and policymakers in Philadelphia and Liverpool dealt with such issues as poverty, disease, poor sanitation, crime, sectarian conflict, and juvenile delinquency. By considering how two cities of comparable population and dimensions responded to similar challenges,…
As part of a multiethnic, multicultural family who has lived in multicultural and multiethnic cities on three continents, I am at ease in plural communities. It’s no surprise then that I’m fascinated by how different cultures intersect inside American communities. I’m especially drawn to novels that portray something broader: the shared civic spaces where immigrants from many backgrounds and longtime residents live side by side. As a novelist, I’m interested in how that chorus and multitude of voices intersect—sometimes clashing, sometimes connecting—and how ordinary encounters gradually shape a community. The books on this list stayed with me because they capture that living mosaic of cultures that continues to shape the American story.
I love novels that reveal the hidden connections between strangers, and this one does it beautifully.
As I read it, I felt as if I were moving through New York alongside a remarkable range of characters whose lives unexpectedly intersect. It left me with the sense that the city itself is a living spidery web of stories—immigrants, artists, judges, mothers, and priests all sharing the same urban space.
The novel reminded me how powerful fiction can be when it allows many voices to exist side by side and slowly reveals the threads that bind them together.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Colum McCann’s beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
"I'm Nicky. Your little sister." With these words from a stranger, Hilda's quiet existence in a marshland cottage with her rescue cats is turned upside down. She resolves to find out the truth about her parents' marriage, her father's secret life and her mother's untimely death.
Nancy Blanton is an American author of Irish descent. A former journalist, she’s written four award-winning novels rooted in 17th century Irish history. Her first novel, Sharavogue, takes place in the lawless West Indies on the island of Montserrat, where the protagonist struggles to survive the slavery, disease, kindness, and brutality of an Irish-owned sugar plantation.
This novel, set in the time of Oliver Cromwell, is about a girl kidnapped from her Galway home and shipped to Barbados to be sold as an indentured servant to work alongside African slaves. We learn of her life as she gives testimony to an English officer after a failed rebellion. Well researched and powerfully written, one can feel the anger and bitterness of her oppressed existence, and her fierce passion for her African rebel husband. It brings history to life.
Kidnapped from Galway, Ireland, as a young girl, shipped to Barbados, and forced to work the land alongside African slaves, Cot Daley's life has been shaped by injustice. In this stunning debut novel, Kate McCafferty re-creates, through Cot's story, the history of the more than fifty thousand Irish who were sold as indentured servants to Caribbean plantation owners during the seventeenth century. As Cot tells her story-the brutal journey to Barbados, the harrowing years of fieldwork on the sugarcane plantations, her marriage to an African slave and rebel leader, and the fate of her children—her testimony reveals an exceptional woman's…
A friend with Parkinson's Disease requested my help in his attempts to understand the famine and its impact on his ancestors in County Clare. Once I began reading the material he brought me I was impelled to discover more. I had already researched and written about an earlier period in Irish history - the Anglo-Norman invasion - and it seemed that everything that happened on both sides of the Irish Sea in the centuries that followed was instrumental in making the famine such a disaster. Our book is the result.
This product of intensive research by members of the Department of Geography at Cork University covers every aspect of the famine as experienced by the people who lived and died through it.
Lavishly illustrated with maps and facsimiles of actual documents it details everything from the design and administration of workhouses to the treatment of migrants upon arrival in Canada, the USA, and Australia. No other book provides such an eloquent and devastating narrative of the suffering experienced by Irish people during the period 1845-52.
Devoid of rhetoric, it displays the facts in easy-to-understand text and statistical analysis, enhanced with first-hand eye-witness accounts from letters and journal extracts.
Best Reference Books of 2012 presented by Library Journal
The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish history, with implications that cannot be underestimated. Over a million people perished between 1845-1852, and well over a million others fled to other locales within Europe and America. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The 2000 US census had 41 million people claim Irish ancestry, or one in five white Americans. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (1845-52) considers how such a near total decimation of…
I’m a novelist and a teacher of writing. My books are fueled by curiosity above all else. I have no expertise in science, so I stand in wonder at complicated systems that remain mostly hidden to me. My interest in food is similarly recreational. I’m married to a great chef and cookbook author, so I’ve learned a lot by osmosis. But when I think back on the process of writing OnePotato, I have to give a lot of credit to my students. They seem to be part of a generation that’s genuinely passionate about eating in healthy, equitable, and sustainable ways. Much of my book was sparked by conversations in the classroom.
There’s a minor thread in my novel about the Irish Potato Famine, and this book was a major resource. It was sobering to learn that there was enough food to feed the Irish peasantry, but it was not distributed according to need. (Much of it was exported.) Worse still, it was a cultural moment in which the wealthy found ways to absolve themselves of the poverty of their neighbors. But I was most shocked to learn about the scientific implications. Essentially, the potato variety that failed was a monoculture. And the solution to the blight involved returning to the Andes, with its vast genetic diversity, and finding a resistant strain.
It started in 1845 and lasted six years. Before it was over, more than one million men, women, and children starved to death and another million fled the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was one of the worst disasters in the nineteenth century - it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War. A perfect storm of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance sparked this catastrophe. But even more extraordinary than its scope were its political underpinnings, and "The Graves Are Walking" provides fresh material and analysis on the role that…
In the throes of the Civil War, Adrien Villere joins Terry's Texas Rangers to safeguard his East Texas home and protect the reputation of his love, Lily Hart.
As war unfolds, Adrien grapples with forbidden love, ethical dilemmas, and the harsh treatment of the enslaved, culminating in a poignant realization…
I am a writer who has spent my entire reading life emersed in the past, reading everything from Russian literature, to nineteenth-century English, to early modern American. It’s no surprise I became a historical fiction novelist. The 1950s is one of my favorite eras to write about because of its complexity. The glamour of the Golden Age and the dark truths it represents make for compelling reads. I hope you love the list below as much as I do.
Ireland is one of my favorite locations for novels, as well as New York City, and this one toggles between both. It’s the story of a young girl in a small town with no opportunity who travels to find a place where she can thrive. It’s a story we’ve heard many times before, and yet it never gets old.
I was drawn to the aspects of this novel that uncover the realities of the 1950s from the perspective of a young, female immigrant with no resources. It deals with survival in a totally different way than the books I listed above. There’s an intensity and reality to it that is profound.
Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. The book that inspired the major motion picture starring Saoirse Ronan.
It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.
Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is…
I've been an avid reader across many genres since I learned to read as a child and have wandered into all sorts of categories to find literature I love. Fantasy became my first love, but that didn't mean I had to abandon everything else. I like finding great books that don't make the big publisher lists with their generic output. Since the rise of indie publishing, I've developed a habit of sampling anything that sounds like it might be interesting and have found some amazing and very original stories!
Fantasy readers often enjoy a good quest. While this would be classed as a feel-good book that takes place in the real world, there are fantastical elements in the adventures of the protagonist, an elderly lady who decides care home life is too dull for her.
A rocky start followed by an interesting series of decisions and taking chances makes for an uplifting adventure story as fulfilling as a typical Fantasy quest.
'Brilliantly funny, emotional and uplifting' Miranda Dickinson
Heartwarming, hilarious and fun - the perfect read for anyone who loved Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, A Man Called Ove, Ruth Jones and JoJo Moyes.
Evie Gallagher is regretting her hasty move into a care home. She may be seventy-five and recently widowed, but she's absolutely not dead yet. And so, one morning, Evie walks out of Sheldon Lodge and sets off on a Great Adventure across Europe.
But not everyone thinks Great Adventures are appropriate for women of Evie's age, least of all her son Brendan and his wife Maura, who…
I’ve been a history nut since junior high trips to prehistoric Indian Mounds in Ohio. I transcribed an early town settler’s diary as a high school project. Traveling with my Air Force hubby gave me a window into faraway places. Allan Eckert’s narrative history of pioneer times grabbed my imagination. My children would love these gripping tales of settler versus Shawnee, yet they’d never crack the two-inch thick volume. I tried writing historical fiction on their level by bringing a young protagonist into the story. I had no idea I’d follow that first book with eight more, delving into the history of various famous Ohioans.
I’m not a feminist and I don’t feel oppressed as a woman. But after reading this book, I’m glad that Elizabeth Cady Stanton hosted the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1858. The young protagonist, Bridie, has experienced some of the wrongs that Mrs. Stanton tries to put right. I enjoyed getting to know the famous activist through Bridie’s eyes. Bridie flees from a cruel master and finds work with “the strangest lady she’s ever met”. Mrs. Stanton comes across as a down-to-earth woman, not the crusader type at all. I laughed at the detail of the two young Stanton boys romping through the cabbages. Kudos to the author for including other events and issues for context—the Irish potato famine, poorhouses, the Free Soil Party, the Erie Canal, and the Underground Railroad. Young ladies will appreciate their privileges after reading this novel.
Celebrate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment with another historical novel about women's suffrage from the author of The Hope Chest!
Bridie's life has been a series of wrongs. The potato famine in Ireland. Being sent to the poorhouse when her mother's new job in America didn't turn out the way they'd hoped. Becoming an orphan.
And then there's the latest wrong--having to work for a family so abusive that Bridie is afraid she won't survive. So she runs away to Seneca Falls, New York, which in 1848 is a bustling town full of possibility. There, she makes friends with…
There is still so much to know about Irish girls’ and women’s lives, and I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to books that explore these themes, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I work as a historian and professor of Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. I love archival research and often find it really exciting to order a file or box in the archives or pull up a newspaper, not knowing what story it is going to tell or what insight I am going to get of an individual’s world in the written records left behind. I hope that you like my choices!
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.’
At seven, Peggy made a terrifying journey through famine-stricken Ireland. Now thirteen, and determined to make a new life for herself, she sets off alone across the Atlantic to America. Will she ever see her family again?
An extraordinary story of courage, independence and adventure
The other books in the Famine trilogy are Under the Hawthorn Tree and Fields of Home.
