By Cahir O'Doherty

The Harp and the Eagle
Professor Susannah Ural Bruce remarkable – and highly readable - study explores the complex political and historical motives that sent 150,000 Irish Catholic soldiers into the ranks of the Union Army during the Civil War. For the majority of Irish soldiers the cause of the union was inextricably linked to the cause of Irish independence and Bruce’s wide ranging study paints a complex and evocative picture of the network of allegiances and experiences that animated Irish participation in the war effort. Recommended.
New York University Press, $22.

The Hill Road
Set in the cloistered, buttoned down world of rural Ireland in the 1950s and 1960’s, Irish born author Patrick O’Keefe’s debut The Hill Road is a collection of affecting tales about of missed opportunities and lost loves. O’Keefe atmospheric descriptions of the Irish countryside are astonishing, making the landscape itself a principle character in each of these dark tales.
Penguin Books, $14.

Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce
Cormac O’Grada’s magisterial study of the Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland is a fascinating economic and demographic history of a small but significant diaspora. The book tells the story of how Irish Jews – and Dublin’s Little Jerusalem in particular – made their living from the 1870s when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants arrived in the country until the 1940s just before the community began its rapid decline. Placing Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in his historical context, the book is certain to start a debate about the relationship between fact and fiction.
Princeton University Press, $35.

A Commonwealth of Thieves
Booker prize winning author Thomas Keneally (author of Schindler’s List, later made into an award winning film starring Liam Neeson) turns his attention to the birth of the Australian nation, with a vast historical study that reads with all the narrative facility of a superior novelist. Using the personal journals that voyagers and convicts kept on their way to a land so new that it had barely been mapped, Keneally paints a portrait of the experimental penal colony that became a nation, home of malcontents, prisoners and the Irish.
Doubleday, $26.95.

Nothing But an Unfinished Song
Everyone knows how and why Bobby Sands died, but here’s a book that covers how he lived. The son of working class parents, he was a young man of his era, listening to David Bowie even as he was getting caught up in the worst years of the Troubles. But before he achieved his iconic status he was just another onlooker, until the events of 1968 that changed his life. When the Civil Rights marchers took to the streets of Northern Ireland he watched with anger as the police attacked them. The sight of RUC truncheons beating back unarmed civilian protestors and the events that followed, including internment without trial, set him on a course that ended with his hunger strike. Dennis O’Hearn writes a sympathetic biography, tracing the all too brief life of this controversial and enigmatic figure.
Nation Books, $16.95.

Always and Forever
Best selling author Cathy Kelly’s new novel explores the ties that bind us and make us human. In Always and Forever her characters are thrown together by fate and in the process they are led to discover what really matters to them. Kelly has a gift for mining the interior lives of her heroines and the sometimes magical undercurrents that connect them to each other.
Downtown Press, $15.