June 8, 1921. Ireland.A British Officer is shot dead on a remote hillside south of Dublin.November 22, 2015. United Kingdom.Former police detective, Jayne Sinclair, now working as a genealogical investigator, receives a phone call from an adopted American billionaire asking her to discover the identity of his real father.How are the two events linked?Jayne Sinclair has only three clues to help her: a photocopied birth certificate, a stolen book and an old photograph. And it soon becomes apparent somebody else is on the trail of the mystery. A killer who will stop at nothing to prevent Jayne discovering the secret hidden in the pastThe Irish Inheritance takes us through the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish War of Independence, combining a search for the truth of the past with all the tension of a modern-day thriller.It is the first in a series of novels featuring Jayne Sinclair, genealogical detective.

Any book that weaves together allusions to both Julian of Norwich and Biddy Early is worth checking out! Add in a dash of mystery, Celtic romance, and wry Irish humor, and the result is this engaging novel from Lillian Lewis, All Shall Be Well. Carl McColman, author of The Big Book of Christian Mysticism and 366 Celt Morgan Kenny is many things, but she is definitely not a psychic. As she flies across the ocean to Ireland to bury her eccentric Aunt Mary, she has no idea that her last link to the old world is about to lead her straight into an intriguing Irish murder mystery. Even so, as Morgans plane settles into its cruising altitude, she is overcome with a feeling that her Aunt Mary is attempting to contact her with an important message. After Morgan deplanes, she receives a telegram that informs her that her aunt has already been buried. Perplexed by the strange unfolding of events, Morgan silently wonders who has taken care of the final details, since she is the last remaining relative in the family. As she begins a fruitless search to find her aunts burial site and the familys ancestral home, Morgan is flooded with memories and voices of the dead who tell her she needs to mine old ways in order to claim her inheritance. Morgan must break the cipher, but not without the help of a teenager, a fourteenth-century English saint, and a handsome archeologist. In this compelling tale rich with history and culture, an American woman embarks on an Irish adventure in which she will learn more about her ancestors and herself than she ever could have imagined.

When a young teacher asks genealogical investigator, Jayne Sinclair, to look into the history of his family, the only clues are a medallion with purple, white and green ribbons, and an old photograph. Her quest leads her to a secret buried in the trenches of World War One for over 100 years.

Dorothy Gallagher began her literary career fabricating stories about celebrities for a pulp magazine. Nothing she invented, however, could rival the facts surrounding her own family. In a singular voice–intimate, fierce, hilarious–Gallagher takes you into the heart of her Russian Jewish heritage with stories as elegant and stylish as fiction. From the wrenching last stages of her parents’ lives, Gallagher moves back through time: to her parents’ beginnings, the adventures of her extended family, and the communist ideology to which they cling. Her aunt Lily sells lingerie to prostitutes; a family friend is found murdered in a bathtub; her cousin Meyer returns to the Ukraine to find his village near death from starvation; and a young Gallagher endures sessions in self-criticism at a Workers’ Children’s camp. Together these episodes tell the larger story of a generation living through tumultuous history, and record the acts of loving defiance of a daughter on her path to independence.

For the last two centuries, literature has tested the authority of the individual and the community. With a historical as well as an interpretative emphasis, Bromwich explores this tension. He shows why the public-mindedness of the eighteenth century is as limited a model for readers now as the individualism of the nineteenth century.

Last wills and testaments create tensions between those who inherit and those who imagine that they should inherit. As Victorian, modern, and contemporary novels amply demonstrate, seldom is more energy expended than at the reading of a will. Whether inheritances bring disappointment or jubilation, they create a pattern for the telling of stories, stories that involve the transmission of legacies - cultural, political, and monetary - from one generation to the next. Troubled Legacies examines these narratives of inheritance in British and Irish fiction from 1800 to the present. The essays in this collection set out to juxtapose legal and novelistic discourse. This reading of literature against law produces intriguing and often provocative assertions about the specific relationship between novels and inheritance. As the contributors argue, novels reinforce property law, an argument bolstered by the examples of women, workers, Jews, and Irishmen dispossessed of their rights and unable to claim their cultural inheritances. Troubled Legacies thoroughly examines the connection between narrative and claims to legal entitlement, a topic that has not, to date, been comprehensively broached in literary studies.