Joseph O’Connor. Star of the Sea

It has become a commonplace to note that although the Irish Famine was a major cataclysm, and one which contributed to the complete reshaping of Ireland in the late nineteenth-century, it has not often found its way into Irish literature – arguably because it was simply too traumatic for representation: as Terry Eagleton puts it, “the events strains at the limits of the inarticulable.” In Star of the Sea, however, the young Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor not only vividly conjures up the memor...