Star of the Sea

by Joseph O’Connor

First published 2002

Amazon

4.0(14,936)

In the winter of 1847, the emigrant ship Star of the Sea sails for New York carrying hundreds of people escaping the Irish Great Famine. In the cabins travel the bankrupt Lord Merridith, his wife Laura and their servant Mary Duane; below decks are families weakened by hunger, disease and dispossession. Among them moves Pius Mulvey, a ballad-maker whose history connects the passengers more closely than they understand.

An American journalist records the voyage while a killer stalks the ship, turning the Atlantic crossing into both a migration narrative and a murder story. Through testimony, letters, songs and retrospective documents, the novel traces the relationships between landlord and tenant, privilege and starvation, political rhetoric and individual responsibility. The ship becomes a compressed version of famine society, carrying old violence towards a country imagined as a place of reinvention.