The Race of the Tiger

by Alexander Cordell

First published 1963

Amazon

3.0(7)

Jess O’Hara and his sister Karen leave a famished nineteenth-century Ireland for the United States, enduring an overcrowded Atlantic crossing before reaching Pittsburgh. There they enter a city transformed by iron and steel, where immigrant labour, furnaces and the promise of sudden wealth create opportunities unavailable at home but demand new forms of compromise.
As Jess rises, Cordell sets personal ambition against labour unrest and the violent industrial capitalism associated with the later nineteenth century. Irish immigrant communities, the Molly Maguires and the fortunes made around the steel industry provide the historical background to a family story about belonging and betrayal. The novel links famine-era migration to the industrial expansion of the United States and asks what is lost when survival becomes social ascent.