Dublin 1950Liesl Bannon has never felt like she was truly at home anywhere, not since her mother placed her and her brother Erich on the last Kindertransport out of Berlin in 1939. She'd been so much more fortunate than most Jews, saved from the horrors of the Nazi regime. Being adopted by Elizabeth and Daniel Lieber meant she and Erich spent the war in Northern Ireland, safe and loved, but Liesl always knew something was missing. When an opportunity to return to Berlin to represent her university presents itself, she is so torn. Should she go back to the city that rejected her and her family, would it be too harrowing, or would it feel like home? In Berlin, a chance encounter with an old family friend sparks emotions for Liesl that she'd suppressed since she was a child. She finds herself desperately wanting to go back to those carefree days before Hitler, when life made sense, but why was her family so set against her return? Was it because they were worried about her as they claimed, or was there a darker, more sinister reason? The Hard Way Home is the third book in the best-selling Star and the Shamrock series.

In The Shamrock and the Cross: Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism, Eileen P. Sullivan traces changes in nineteenth-century American Catholic culture through a study of Catholic popular literature. Analyzing more than thirty novels spanning the period from the 1830s to the 1870s, Sullivan elucidates the ways in which Irish immigration, which transformed the American Catholic population and its institutions, also changed what it meant to be a Catholic in America. In the 1830s and 1840s, most Catholic fiction was written by American-born converts from Protestant denominations; after 1850, most was written by Irish immigrants or their children, who created characters and plots that mirrored immigrants’ lives. The post-1850 novelists portrayed Catholics as a community of people bound together by shared ethnicity, ritual, and loyalty to their priests rather than by shared theological or moral beliefs. Their novels focused on poor and working-class characters; the reasons they left their homeland; how they fared in the American job market; and where they stood on issues such as slavery, abolition, and women’s rights. In developing their plots, these later novelists took positions on capitalism and on race and gender, providing the first alternative to the reigning domestic ideal of women. Far more conscious of American anti-Catholicism than the earlier Catholic novelists, they stressed the dangers of assimilation and the importance of separate institutions supporting a separate culture. Given the influence of the Irish in church institutions, the type of Catholicism they favored became the gold standard for all American Catholics, shaping their consciousness until well into the next century.

Ariella Bannon has no choice. She must put her precious children Liesl and Erich on that train or allow them to become prey for the Nazis. Berlin 1939.

Shamrock Tea is an Irish drug that enables its users to see things not given to ordinary mortals. They can sense colours and sounds more vividly; they can penetrate the surface of paintings; they can cross time. The narrator, his cousin and a strange Belgian friend know that their lives are ruled mysteriously by the great van Eyck painting, The Arnolfini Portrait, and they have travelled in dream like moments through the painting into other times. They discover that each moment is connected to every other. But in the strange world of Shamrock Tea, no story can be straightforward. With a cast of characters that includes the gardener Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book will blow your mind.

Secret Service agent John Mavio infiltrates the infamous Hell's Kitchen in New York to shut down a ring of organized crime leaders in an elaborate counterfeit money operation, perhaps the worst in history.--From publisher's description.

The Roman Province of Britain 402 A.D. Irish pirates kidnap young Patrick and sell him into slavery. He falls in love. He flees his master and returns home. Nothing there is as he remembers. The shame of his past haunts him. Eventually, the Pope sends Patrick back to Ireland on a mission to convert the Celts. Will the chieftains of Eire listen to Patrick or kill him? Brigid, a druid’s daughter, holds her love for Patrick across the years of their separation. She inherits her father’s magic but is scorned by the court druids. In exile, along Ireland’s cliffs, she waits for Patrick’s return. Will Patrick’s and Brigid’s passion catch fire? Will a new day dawn, uniting the old ways with the new religion? Or....will the fires of magic be doused forever on the Emerald Isle? Two hearts and the fate of Ireland hang in the balance.