The arrival of Dymphna's Book Club can only mean one thing... the 899 days of January have come to an end!
Thanks to The Book Centre, Waterford, Dymphna has a stack of reads guaranteed to ease you into the brighter evenings.
Pull up a chair, pour a cuppa, and enjoy...
Where the Heart Should Be by Sarah Crossan
A truly outstanding novel from the Carnegie Medal-winning, former Laureate na nOg Sarah Crossan.
It is thought-provoking and incredibly moving, and explores love and family during The Great Hunger Ireland, 1846.
What is particularly unique about this book is the writing style, bite-sized chapters written in almost poetic form, making the historical content age appropriate and not too heavy.
Our main character Nell is working as a scullery maid in the kitchen of the Big House.
Once she loved school and books and dreaming.
But there's not much choice of work when the land grows food that rots in the earth.
Now she is scrubbing, peeling, washing, sweeping for Sir Philip Wicken, the man who owns her home, her family's land, their crops, everything.
His dogs are always well fed, even as famine sets in.
Upstairs in the Big House, where Nell is forbidden to enter, is Johnny Browning, newly arrived from England: the young nephew who will one day inherit it all.
And as hunger and disease run rampant all around them, a spark of life and hope catches light when Nell and Johnny find each other.
This is a love story, and the story of a people being torn apart.
This is a powerful and unforgettable novel from the phenomenally talented Sarah Crossan.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
If like most people, you're aware of this book due to the phenomenal success of the Disney+ limited series, you are not alone!
One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again.
Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of this terrible crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades.
Author Patrick Radden Keefe offers not just a forensic account of a brutal crime but a vivid portrait of the world in which it happened.
Say Nothing deftly weaves the stories of Jean McConville and her family with those of Dolours Price, the first woman to join the IRA as a front-line soldier.
Price bombed the Old Bailey when barely out of her teens, under the alleged orders of Gerry Adams, who helped bring an end to the fighting, but denied his own IRA past.
Also woven through the narrative is Brendan Hughes, a fearsome IRA commander who turned on Adams after the peace process and broke the IRA's code of silence; and other indelible figures.
An incredible read, and, to be fair, an incredible television series- it ensures a new generation of people have access to living history.
The Cliffs by J Courtney Sullivan
When a book has been chosen by both Reese Witherspoon's Book Club and The Book Centre, Waterford, you know you're on to a winner!
On a secluded cliff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house that contains a century's worth of secrets.
By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned - yet there are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards.
The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane, and becomes a hideaway for her, a place to escape her troubled, volatile mother.
Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable.
The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a magazine.
Convinced that the house is haunted, Genevieve hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there.
The story Jane uncovers - of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artefacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism - is even older than Maine itself.
Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets by Clair Wills
How far would you go for the missing?
This book does what many others have also done- it explores Ireland's history of Mother and Baby Homes.
However, where this book is different, is the depth to which it explores the violence which often led to the birth of a baby.
This violence, often sexual in nature, took place within homes, families, and communities across the country.
The Book Centre, Waterford has chosen this book as their book of the month, and for very good reason.
Author Clair Wills explores the history of the absent father, the silent homes, and the willingness with which society often followed 'the rules.'
When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met.
Born in a Mother and Baby Home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers.
Yet she was never told of her existence.
How could a whole family - a whole country - abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history?
To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child. T
here are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence - stories, secrets, silences.
The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.
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