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The West's Awake: The Queenstown Series Book 2 Kindle Edition
Sixteen-year-old Harp Devereaux is growing up in a country in turmoil. Her mother Rose is struggling to navigate single parenthood, run the Cliff House, and stay out of the way of the authorities.Harp’s uncle, Ralph Devereaux, has only one thing on his mind.The port of Queenstown bustles with activity as people traverse the Atlantic either in search of new lives on foreign shores or returning to old familiar ones in Ireland. The Cliff House is fast gaining a reputation as a wonderful place to stay, and the business is going from strength to strength. Rose and Harp have turned their fortunes around and for the first time they are prosperous and independent. But all is not well. Civil and military unrest across the country in the wake of the Easter Rising is threatening to bubble over, and everyone is on edge. The British soldiers are making their presence felt in unpleasant ways, and the return of Ralph Devereaux to what he sees as his ancestral home is poses a serious threat.Just as they are managing the situation, a series of unforeseen events places both Harp and her mother in grave peril. Ralph suddenly holds all the power and is not afraid to wield it. They desperately need help, and there’s only one place they can go to get it.From a tense Queenstown to the vibrant Irish community in Boston, from wartime Liverpool, to the streets of Dublin seething with revolution, The West’s Awake continues the spellbinding Queenstown Story.
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJune 13, 2021
- File size4795 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B08Y86RSQD
- Publisher : (June 13, 2021)
- Publication date : June 13, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 4795 KB
- Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 278 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #16,327 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #19 in Historical Irish Fiction
- #81 in Women's Sagas
- #92 in Historical British & Irish Literature
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
JEAN GRAINGER
USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR
SELECTED BY BOOKBUB READERS IN TOP 19 OF HISTORICAL FICTION BOOKS
WINNER OF THE 2016 AUTHOR'S CIRCLE HISTORICAL NOVEL OF EXCELLENCE
'Warm and wise, reading a Jean Grainger novel is like sitting in the kitchen of a friend. Her authentic writing welcomes you into the heart of Ireland.' Kate Kerrigan, NYT Bestselling Author.
'In the same magical tradition as classic Irish storytellers, Maeve Binchy and Frank McCourt, Jean Grainger transports the reader into a world where the characters not only come alive, but become friends, who stay with you long after you've closed the last page. I have no doubt that Jean Grainger will be considered one of the finest historical novelists of our time.' Roberta Kagan, Bestselling author of 'All My Love, Detrick' series.
Hello and thanks for taking time out to check out my page. If you're wondering what you're getting with my books, then think of the late great Maeve Binchy but sometimes with an historical twist. I was born in Cork, Ireland in 1971 and I come from a large family of storytellers, so much so that we had to have 'The Talking Spoon', only the person holding the spoon could talk!
I have worked as a history lecturer at University, a teacher of English, History and Drama in secondary school, a playwright, and a tour guide of my beloved Ireland. I am married to the lovely Diarmuid and we have four children. We live in a 200 year old stone cottage in Mid-Cork with my family and the world's smallest dogs, called Scrappy and Scoobi..
My experiences leading groups, mainly from the United States, led me to write my first novel, 'The Tour'. My observances of the often funny, sometimes sad but always interesting events on tours fascinated me. People really did confide the most extraordinary things, the safety of strangers I suppose. It's a fictional story set on a tour bus but many of the characters are based on people I met over the years. Little was I to know that it would end up as a six-book series.
My first World War 2 novel, 'So Much Owed' is a family saga based in Ireland following the Buckley family of Dunderrig House. The story opens in the trenches of WW1 at the end of the war and moves to tranquil West Cork. As the next generation of the Buckley family find themselves embroiled once again in war, the action moves from Ireland to wartime Belfast, from occupied France to the inner sanctum of German society in neutral Dublin. The history of the period was my academic specialty so I'm delighted to be able to use it in a work of fiction.
Shadow of a Century is set in New York in 2015 as well as in Dublin during the events of Easter Week 1916, where Irish men and women fought valiantly to rid our island of British imperialism. While not my academic specialty, I loved researching this book. It's essentially a love story, but with a bit of intrigue thrown in for good measure.
Under Heaven's Shining Stars was published in 2016 and is set in my home city of Cork. This time it's against the backdrop of 1950s and 60s Ireland and it really is a book about friendship, family and the Catholic church. I have a deep personal affinity with all of my characters but this book is especially close to my heart.
A book I wrote while travelling with my family for a year in Australia is called Sisters of the Southern Cross, and don't forget to read the afterword on that one as to how that story came about - it's a tale stranger than fiction in its own right!
I wrote a novel called Letters of Freedom after hearing a woman on the radio one day explaining how being raised in state care prepared a person so poorly for the realities of independent living. Her story was so moving I was inspired to write a short novella there and then.
Carmel's story really seemed to touch people, and I got such a huge reaction from readers all over the world, many of them telling me the most extraordinary stories from their own lives, that I wrote a sequel. The Future's Not Ours To See follows Carmel as she ventures forth into a world she knows so little of is. The third Carmel and Sharif book, What Will be, is also available and it finishes the story of this woman who spent her entire childhood believing something that wasn't true. She returns to Ireland, very reluctantly and discovers that in order to go forward she has to first make peace with her past.
My next series, The Robinswood Story, opens with What Once Was True, and tells the story of a big old house in Co Waterford during WW2. Two families live there, the impoverished Keneficks who own it and the hard-working Murphys who work for them. The sequel to this, Return to Robinswood, continues the story, and the final instalment, Trials and Tribulations, takes it to its conclusion.
The Star and the Shamrock, the Emerald Horizon, The Hard Way Home and The World Starts Anew is a series of four books about two little German Jewish children who find themselves on the Kindertransport out of Berlin. They end up in Northern Ireland, and it was a real labour of love. The research was harrowing at times, but I hope I've done justice to the stories of so many children who escaped the Nazi terror, often never again to see their parents. This is a book of hope in dark times, of the enduring power of love and the incredible resilience of the human spirit.
Another series, The Queenstown Series, centres on twelve year old Harp Devereaux and her mother Rose, and the first book, Last Port of Call, opens on the day Titanic sails from Queenstown, Co Cork on her last fateful journey. It is a bestselling series and people really seem to connect to the precocious Harp and her hard-working mother as they battle to survive in a society where conforming and playing by the rules was paramount. It is a four-book series, The West's Awake, The Harp and the Rose and Roaring Liberty completing the set.
Many of the people who have reviewed my books have said that you get to know the characters and really become attached to them. That's wonderful for me to hear because that's how I feel about them too. I grew up on Maeve Binchy and Deirdre Purcell and I aspired to being like them. If you buy one of my books, I'm very grateful and I really hope you enjoy it. If you do, or even if you don't, please take the time to post a review. Writing is a source of constant contentment to me and I am so fortunate to have the time and the inclination to do it, but to read a review written by a reader really does make my day.
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Harp and her Mother, Rose, have taken Cliff House which Harp inherited from Henry Devereaux who stated in his will that Harp was his daughter, and turned it into a boarding house. They intended to appeal to the middle-class travelers who came to Queenstown to catch a ship usually to America. They didn’t interfere with the hotel which catered to the well-to-do- travelers nor to the boarding house which catered to the lower-class passengers. They were doing quite well although what profits they made were going back into the house for improvements. The only problem they really had was when Ralph Devereaux came home from India and insisted on staying in his family home. Since Ralph was really Harp’s Father and Ralph didn’t know that he was, Rose felt it necessary to let him stay there for no charge. However, this time, he was back earlier than normal and seemed to intend to stay much longer. Harp did her best to stay away from Ralph as well as the British officers who also stayed there.
Feelings were very high against the British since the Easter Uprising and the subsequent hanging of the Irish ringleaders. Harp wants to do something and with the help of the Devlin sisters, signs on to the ladies rebellion group to help. She is chosen to go to America to meet with the Irish there and bring back the funds they are raising for the rebellion. At sixteen, her Mother isn’t for this; but she is talked into it because Harp is going to stay with friends there and see the Irish flutist, Francis O’Neill. Meeting him on the first night she is in America makes her trip worthwhile. She even gets to play the harp and accompany him. Instead of the two weeks she intends to stay, she ends up cutting it short because she gets a letter telling her that her Mother is going to marry Ralph Devereaux. Instantly, she knows he had to be blackmailing her and she needs to get home to stop him.
It seems as if when one problem is close to being solved, another one pops up. The action just keeps going. This is another book which is very difficult to put down before you finish. Ironically, this book deals with Irish Independence and I sat down to read it on our Independence Day, July 4. I definitely had lots of time to just read and not have to stop. Now I am waiting patiently for the next book to come out in August.
the descriptions of the time period...1916...tumultuous, war torn on more than one front and continent are well written, so it feels like you are smelling the salt air from the Cliff House or perhaps listening to Harp and John Joe sing together. Can't wait to read the next book in the series!