The Whitest Flower - Softcover

Graham, Brendan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0002258153 ISBN 13: 9780002258159

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1998

Synopsis

This is the story of Ellen ‘Rua’ O’Malley, the twenty-six-year-old wife of a poor tenant farmer, and her fight for survival against an unrelenting plague that sweeps a wasted land; and of a tyrannical landlord system which rules with a heart of stone.

It is August 1845. In Dublin’s Botanic Gardens, Phytophora infestans is discovered for the first time. The bacteria was to result in the Great Famine, an event of holocaust proportions that affected every man, woman and child in Ireland. England’s shame; Ireland’s tragedy.

Ellen O’Malley is one such victim. She loses her husband, is duped into going to Australia to lead a better life, leaving behind three of her beloved children. She travels aboard a coffin ship and arrives emaciated and ill with her new baby. But Ellen, a woman with an indomitable spirit, rises above her oppression and eventually returns to wreak revenge on those perpetrators of her misery.

About this title

Review:

Feel like curling up in front of the fire one grey afternoon and escaping the mundanity of your nine to five life? Then clutch this epic historical romance to your bosom and succumb to a tale that will take you from famine stricken Ireland in the 1840s to the aborigine bushlands in Australia, the immigrant-strewn shores of Boston and back. At the heart of the book is the formidable heroine Ellen Dua, an Irish firebrand who loses her husband to the famine and her children to an unscrupulous Irish landowner. Her efforts to regain the things she holds dear is a roller-coaster journey of passion and despair, though Graham is at his best in his early descriptions of the Irish homeland she is forced to give up. Nearly every human tragedy imaginable occurs in this novel, and yet still, somehow, Ellen's undoubtable spiritual goodness shines through the tears. The clicheÁs might fly at you thick and fast, but with escapism this good, you'll be too busy hanging on with your hand in your mouth until the bitter end to notice. -- Claire Allfree

Review:

‘Irish history is like a gold seam for historical novelists – there to be mined. Occasionally a nuggest is produced and Graham’s is one of those.’
Ireland on Sunday

‘The guy can write. Lyrical music. Musical prose.’
Sunday Independent

‘Posted for worldwide literary success. A gripping page-turner about one of the grossest stains on the British Empire.’
Hotpress

‘A remarkable and emotional odyssey which uses the great Irish famine and the subsequent diaspora as the subject matter for a novel of immense potency.’
Irish Post

‘This huge sweep of a novel will whisk you from Ireland to Australia and Canada.’
Woman’s Realm

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0002258153
• ISBN 13: 9780002258159
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544