Blog Tour ~ A River in the Trees by Jacqueline O'Mahony

Jaffareadstoo is delighted to host one of today's stops on the  A River in the Trees Blog Tour

Riverrun
10 January 2019

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of this book and the invitation to be part of the blog tour

Two women. Two stories. One hundred years of secrets. Everything I love about dual time stories is found in A River in the Trees which looks at two very different women whose stories overlap and interweave in a story of family secrets and hidden tragedy.

1919, and in West Cork, Hannah is living a bleak existence on the family farm. It's a life of hardship which is made all the more complicated by the family's involvement in the Irish War of Independence. Hiding a group of rebel fighters in the attic at the farmhouse puts Hannah and her family in grave danger from the notorious Black and Tans who will stop at nothing to apprehend the rebels and prevent insurrection. Hannah is attracted to O'Riada, the fanatical leader of the rebels, a connection which will have repercussions for  Hannah, and her family, for generations to come.

In 2019, Ellen is at a crossroads in her life. Unsatisfied by both her work and her relationship with her husband, Ellen returns to Ireland to discover more about her family history. What she finds when she starts to dig into the past is both poignant and shocking in equal measure.

Moving both forwards and backward quite seamlessly A River in the Trees is a beautifully written story about family secrets. It's about living in a time when families were divided not just by politics  but by the way the harsh realities of life influenced everything about their world and their place in it. Moving forwards a hundred years and Ellen's story shows her to be in a very different world but yet, the parallels still remain of troubled family dynamics and of relationships which are fractured beyond repair.

I started to read A River in the Trees at the start of this new year and by the time I was just a few pages into the story, I knew that this book, my first read of the year, was rather special. I turned the pages eagerly wanting to know more, not just about Ellen in the here and now but also about Hannah,  a true heroine, whose  desperately sad story will stay with me for a long, long time.

A River in the Trees already heads my ' Reads of the Year  in 2019 ' list.

About the Author

Jacqueline O'Mahony is from, Cork, Ireland. She did her BA in Ireland, her MA at the University of Bologna, and her PhD in History as a Fulbright Scholar at Duke University, and at Boston College. She has worked as a writer, editor and stylist at Tatler, Vogue and the Irish Independent. 

She lives in Notting Hill with her husband and three young children.

Twitter @jacomahony #ARiverInTheTrees

@QuercusBooks @riverrunbooks

Review ~ The English Daughter by Maggie Wadey

Sandstone Press
2016

A bit of blurb..

As a child I was aware of my mother being different from my father and his family, and that her difference was somehow connected with her being Irish, but I knew almost nothing of her youth and upbringing. In the year or so before she died, she did begin to talk to me about her past. The first sequence of the book is based on those childhood memories. Only after my mother’s death do I go to Tipperary and there I begin to discover another story, the life she never told me about.

My thoughts about the book..

After her mother's death, the author returns to her mother's Tipperary birthplace, and  there she learns about a life she never knew had existed. She always thought that her mother was different in upbringing from her father, but Maggie never realised just how much her mother's life had been influenced by her Irish childhood.

The author writes well and with great compassion about her mother's life and it is obvious that she is very competent in putting a story together. Part biography and part social history, The English Daughter is a compassionate study of what life was like in rural Ireland during the early part of the twentieth century and with great insight the author succeeds in bringing her mother's story alive.

It's strange, isn't it, that only when we have lost someone do we feel compelled to go back over their lives, sadly, when they are no longer in a position to recount their story for themselves. I think that Maggie Wadey has more than done justice to her mother's story and for that she should feel justifiably proud of herself. 

Best Read With ...Irish Soda bread, liberally spread with butter and a drop of Poitín..

About the Author

Maggie Wadey is a novelist and screenwriter. Her childhood was spent in England,  Egypt , Cyprus and a Sussex boarding school, After a brief time as a model she read philosophy at University College London. Amongst her screenplays are adaptations of Mansfield Park, the Buccaneers, the Yellow Wallpaper and the children's novel Stig of the Dump . She lives in East London with her husband.

My thanks to Diana at Ruth Killick Publicity for my copy of this book.

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