The Irish Famine was not said to be over for several more years and the huge number of casualties is still being argued over in the twenty-first century.
It is certainly true that a million or more died, though probably more from illness than from starvation. A million or more emigrated, a process that has continued ever since.
Some of the characters in this novel are historical persons. Sir George Molyneux mourned his ten-year-old son in March 1847 when this little boy, his eldest son and heir, died of scarlet fever. Sir George himself died a year later, aged thirty-five, his wife, Lady Emma, marrying in England a year after that.
But five million people survived, including many of those recreated in this novel, a fiction that tries to be true to the facts and to the courage of those like Sarah and Jonathan who ‘did what they could, did it in love and saw that often it was even more than they could have hoped’.
Their descendants are still doing just that in 2016.
Anne Doughty,
Belfast