Irish Women Write: 5 Novels as Varied as the Shade of Green

Actually three books that follow Kate and Baba, two ambitious Irish country girls who leave rural Ireland for Dublin in search of life: romantic Kate seeks love, while pragmatic Baba will take whatever she can get. Under the big city’s bright lights, they spin their lives into a whirl of comic and touching misadventures, wild flirtations, and reckless passions. But love changes everything. And as their lives take unexpected and separate turns, Baba and Kate must ultimately learn to go it alone.

When former nanny Maddie McGlade receives a letter from the last of her charges, she realizes the time has come to unburden herself of a secret she has kept for more than seventy years: the truth behind the death of Charlotte Ormond, the four-year-old daughter of the wealthy household where Maddie was employed as a young woman. Based on chilling events that actually took place in the north of Ireland in 1892, this is a dark, emotionally complex novel that explores the dark side of turn-of-the century aristocracy. Charlotte's mother, Harriet Osmond, is violent, abusive, and (what else?) an avid lepidopterist.

In stories that range from how an expat's home homecoming shakes things up for her family, who finds her life utterly scandalous to one woman whose relationship is so bleedin' perfect in every way that it's driving her friends up the wall to two women's madcap road trip through the states where they have completely opposite reactions to a pair of insanely good-looking men this fabulous collection from some of Ireland's finest women authors celebrates the joys and perils of love, the adventure and constancy of female friendships, and their own irresistible brand of Irish charm.

Behind the high, closed walls of a convent in the Irish countryside, the lives of its inhabitants are gently marked by the daily rituals of spiritual life.

An unforgettable array of quietly wrenching stories about despair and desire in the timeless world of modern-day Ireland.