Daughters of Hunger

This is a novel about how hunger has affected the lives of four women covering a period of about one hundred and fifty years.

The events take place in a country that hungers for self government.

Sheila O'Donnell dies from malnutrition towards the end of the Irish famine.

Her daughter Cliona is deserted by the father and reared in the workhouse.

Cliona grows into an attractive young woman and the wealthy owner of the house in which she is a servant takes advantage of her innocence and ignorance.

Pregnant, she is given the choice of having the child adopted or dismissal.

She keeps her baby and rears it in penury and shame.

When she is an old woman she records her life in three notebooks.

Margaret marries a local farmer who rescued her from drowning when she was a child.

Their rented patch of land is not viable but she is determined to get rich so she imposes a harsh economy on her family.When parliament passes a series of Land Acts, she and her husband are able to purchase, bit by bit, a few acres until they prosper.

Sheila, Margaret's daughter, called after her grandmother, marries and seems content to bury herself in a sleepy historic village. It is only after her death that her two daughters discover that she had a thriving inner artistic life, leaving behind a number of paintings.

Stifled by what she experiences as authoritarianism and triviality, Sheila's second daughter Dodie joins her sister who has depicted a colourful scenario of London in the 'swinging sixties'.In the capital, she is bewildered by the pace of life, disappointed in love and in her sister's behaviour.

She experiments with drugs and sex and disillusioned, retreats to the safety of a convent where she is forced to appraise her life.

Returning home, she finds growing violence and a people unable to let go of the past.

It is only after she reads her great grandmother's journals, like her mother and grandmother, she finds in them comfort and the courage to make something of her own life.