Irish Famine - Synopsis

On the Old Edition

The Irish Famine was a disaster hard to comprehend: 700,000 people on relief work in 1847; an emigration (two million between 1846 and 1855) without precedent in human history; 250,000 people evicted from their homes and farmsteads and a million dead of starvation or disease. It is therefore extraordinary that the famine barely appears in Irish literature and that historians have only recently begun to study it seriously. This little book is a remarkable investigation of why that should be.

On the New Edition with Diarmaid Ferriter

This unique volume, comprising Colm Toibin Tóibín’s acclaimed short text and a linked collection of key documents put together by one of Ireland’s leading younger historians, offers a many-sided view of one’s of history’s most poignant and far-reaching catastrophes.

This book will allow the reader to understand the complex way in which the fragmentary past is both available to us … and distant from us.’ We get those insights from Tóibín’s short history and from a rich collection of documents — government papers, recipes, journalism,

letters, statistics, personal statements, all linked so the book can be read as a whole.

Published in association with the London Review of Books