March is here and it’s time for St. Patrick’s Day! Whether you claim Irish heritage, or just enjoy shamrocks and leprechauns, celebrate the Irish in you with a couple of these titles.
FILMS
Once
When a brokenhearted street musician clicks with a beautiful and feisty keyboardist, the unlikely couple have nothing –and everything –to lose. Over the course of one electric week, the duo writes, performs and records an incredible cycle of songs that are as spontaneous and soulful as their unbelievable romance.
Angela’s Ashes
The 1999 drama based on Frank McCourt’s memoir of the same name chronicles the author’s childhood following his family’s forced emigration from America back to Ireland. It tells the touching tale of McCourt’s struggle to earn enough money to return to “the land of opportunity.”
Far and Away
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play Irish immigrants trying to cash in on the American dream. The duo eventually participate in the Land Run of 1893, when over 100,000 people flooded to present-day Oklahoma to claim land during the opening of the Cherokee Outlet.
The Quiet Man
The 1952 American classic follows a retired American boxer, played by John Wayne, who moves to Ireland in the 1920s to reclaim his family’s farm. He embraces the land after falling in love with an Irishwoman (Maureen O’Hara). The romantic drama earned John Ford a best director Oscar.
The Commitments
The 1991 classic Irish dramedy adapted from Roddy Doyle’s novel of the same name follows working class Dubliners who form an American-style soul band. Despite its relatively unknown cast, Alan Parker’s film was met with critical acclaim and box office success. It also put actor Colm Meaney on the map.
BOOKS
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín
Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín’s superb seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it.
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
The Gault family leads a life of privilege in early 1920s Ireland, but the threat of violence leads the parents of nine-year-old Lucy to decide to leave for England, her mother’s home.
1916 by Morgan LLywelyn
Irish novelist and historian Llywelyn provides a fascinating account of the doomed 1916 Easter Rebellion. As fictional characters plot and fight alongside actual historical figures, the reader is swept up in both the glory and the tragedy of the doomed battle for Irish independence.
A Few of the Girls by Maeve Binchy
A Few of the Girls is a glorious collection of the very best of Binchy’s short story writing, stories that were written over the decades–some published in magazines, others for friends as gifts, many for charity benefits.
Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume
A debut novel already praised as “unbearably poignant and beautifully told” (Eimear McBride) this captivating story follows — over the course of four seasons — a misfit man who adopts a misfit dog
An Irish Country Doctor by Patrick Taylor
An Irish Country Doctor is a charming and engrossing tale that will captivate readers from the very first page–and leave them yearning to visit the Irish countryside of days gone by.
The Immortal Irishman : The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero by Timothy Egan
The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York — the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.