Product Description

In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster, the 'Star of the Sea' sets sail for New York. On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees. Among them are a maidservant with a devastating secret, bankrupt Lord Merridith and his family, an aspiring novelist, a maker of revolutionary ballads, all braving the Atlantic in search of a new home. All are connected more deeply than they can possibly know. But a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks. hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution. The twenty-six-day journey will see many lives end, others begin afresh. In a spellbinding story of tragedy and healing, the further the ship sails towards the Promised Land, the more her passengers seem moored to a past which will never let them go.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5755 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Tragedy is a word too often used. Nevertheless, in Star of the Sea Joseph O'Connor manages to achieve a real sense of the tragic, as personal dramas of the most distressing kind play themselves out against the background of the Irish potato famine and the almost equal nightmare of the mass emigration that it caused. As passengers die of starvation and disease in steerage, a drama of adultery, inadvertent incest and inherited disease plays itself out in first class. O'Connor raises, and does not attempt definitively to answer, real questions about responsibility and choice.

Bankrupt aristocrat Meredith is emigrating, pursued by the hatred of his tenants and the memory of his mad-hero father. His children's nurse, Mary, has memories of lost love to torment her, as well as of the husband and child who died of hunger. And the ballad singer Mulvey has both his monstrous past and the certain promise that he will be tortured to death by the Liable Men should he not kill Meredith. This is a kaleidoscopic novel, whose events are seen in many idioms, from many points of view--it is a rich novel that knows that there are limits to the sense that can be made of history. --Roz Kaveney

Waterstone's Books Quarterly
'A modern-day Irish masterpiece'

Spectator
‘This is a tremendous book; affecting, intelligent, ironic, humane and utterly convincing. It is also extremely funny.’

Customer Reviews

Illuminating, compelling and stylish
I devoured this novel on a recent vacation to Florida, making a nice counterpoint to traipsing around DisneyWorld with the kids. It is undoubtedly one of the finest novels I've read in the last couple of years.
O'Connor's characters are astonishingly well drawn. Set firmly in the historical context, one could quite easily believe they existed, though the nearest thing to a narrator – Grantley Dixon - is perhaps the least believable figure and potentially the novel's only weak point.
All the key POV characters - Merredith, Mulvey, Mary Duane - are drawn in shades of grey. Indeed, Pius Mulvey is an extremely sympathetic protagonist until events and his own dark urges take him beyond the point of no return on the road to Leeds. It’s at this point that all sympathy is lost. Even the secondary characters – Captain Lockwood, Rev Deedes, Nicholas Mulvey, Laura Merredith – are nicely delineated. O’Connor has a genuine gift for characterisation.
The novel’s structure is likewise fascinating. In many ways it resembles Stoker’s Dracula in its use of diary accounts, letters and recollections from multiple viewpoints. By wrapping the whole story up in authentic trappings, the novel has the air of a historical document. Even if these stylistic flourishes are disregarded, you’re left with a truly compelling plot and a nice final twist.
Star of the Sea is polemical without being naïve. It’s heart wrenching without becoming soapy (far from it). It’s understandably downbeat without being depressing. Above all, it’s a great tale derived from a dark chapter in the history of these Isles and the author is a massive talent.

A ripping good read.
When the "potato famine" of 1847 was over, two million residents of Ireland had died agonizing deaths, most of them from starvation. The events which led to the famine, the people who were directly affected by it, and the steps taken to ameliorate or escape it are the subjects of Joseph O’Connor’s intense and heartfelt novel, Star of the Sea, named for the British-owned "famine ship" which is the center of the action here.

O’Connor presents four main characters who recall the pivotal experiences of their lives which lead them to make this fateful, 27-day journey. The reader becomes emotionally involved with their stories, acquiring a broad background in Irish social history--and its tragedies--in the process. Thomas David Nelson Merridith, Lord Kingscourt, is the ninth generation of his Protestant family to govern Kingscourt, with hundreds of workers dependent upon him. Now bankrupt, he and his family are going to America, first-class. Their nanny, Mary Duane, has recently joined the family, and her stories of her past loves, her marriage, and her loss of her own children illuminate the bleak prospects available to this warm and intelligent, but desperately poor, woman.

G. Grantley Dixon is a caricature of the liberal American do-gooder, whose reports about the plight of the Irish poor are influenced by his own socialism and by the reform-minded traditions of his family. Self-centered in his attitudes and limited in his social graces, he is detested by Merridith. Pius Mulvey is a mysterious ex-convict who comes from the same town as Merridith and Mary Duane, directly connected to both of them. One of over 400 passengers who have paid $8 per person for passage, he is crammed into the fetid and dangerous quarters known as "steerage," expected to stay alive on one quart of water a day and half a pound of hardtack.

O’Connor pulls out all the stops here in this big, broad melodrama, but an honesty of emotion and a fidelity to the facts here saves the novel from bathos and gives the reader cause for thought. Moments of both ineffable sadness and high drama arise, and O’Connor’s imagery, especially his sense imagery, is arresting. Occasionally, his compression of time, for the sake of story, leads to anachronisms--several mentions of evolution, with parallels between monkeys and Irishmen, ignore the fact that Darwin’s Evolution of the Species was not published until twelve years after this famine. Still, O’Connor presents a compelling story with many unforgettable details of Irish history. The ending is preachy, but the author does provide a follow-up on the characters after their arrival in America. The fact that at least one character becomes a politician (later accused of misappropriation of funds) will surprise no one accustomed to politics. Mary Whipple

A pleasant surprise
I hadn't previously read Joe O'Connor, a writer with a high profile in Ireland (he is the brother of the singer, Sinead O'Connor).
This is a gem of a book, stylishly writen and extremely well researched. The watershed years of the Irish famine have not, to my knowledge, been tackled before and I learned a great deal about this era. Characters are well drawn and the writer even manages to elicit some sympathy for the odious Mulvey. Many of the contemporary illustrations, letters and lyrics which are interspersed between chapters are extremely illuminating and I found myself coming back to these even after finishing the book.
The faux research style of the journalist Dixon grates in places and the ending is rather more long-winded than it could be, but all-in-all this book is highly recommended.