(Published by Virago Press Ltd)
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Between 1845 and 1850, more than a million Irish people starved to death. Another half-million were evicted from their homes during the potato blight, and a further million-and-a-half emigrated to America, Britain and Australia.
The Naming of Eliza Quinn is an engrossing book, documenting the life of an extraordinary woman during the famine times. It is told in three voices, starting with Beatrice, a descendant of Eliza who has returned to Ireland in the late 1960s. In the hollow of an ancient oak tree beyond a derelict cottage in Cork she finds the bones of a three-year-old girl. The bones date back to the time of the Great Famine and local research reveals that the house had originally belonged to the Quinns. Eliza Quinn was their daughter.
Local healer Eliza, who lived during the Famine, was determined that her son would survive the potato blight – no matter what.
Although mainly a story of sorrow and hardship, it is also about love – the love between Eliza and her husband, between a mother and child and, generations later, the love revisited on the modern Quinn and Vesey union.
Birch has brilliantly captured all that the ordinary Irish people suffered in the 1840s. “Hunger’s a great leveller,” Birch writes, as she slowly reveals the depth of each character’s emotions as they confront day-to-day life during the horrendous time of the Great Irish Famine. Highly recommended. 
