O’FLAHERTY, Liam. Famine (Signed by O’Flaherty)

London: Gollancz, 1949. Second edition. pp. 448. Green cloth. Minor foxing to endpapers and fore-edge. Signed presentation copy from O’Flaherty to Tommy Smyth. A fine copy in a near fine dust jacket.
“To review great books” wrote Sean O’Faolain of this work “is an easy task; to write a critique a difficult one. All that is necessary in the case of Famine is to say that it is O’Flaherty’s best novel. It is tremendous. It is biblical. There is a compression of emotion to be found only in the greatest books”.
Famine is O’Flaherty’s most enduring historical novel and one of the major literary treatments of An Gorta Mór. Set in the west of Ireland during 1845-47, it follows the Kilmartin family and their neighbours as potato failure, eviction and disease strip a rural community of livelihood and dignity. O’Flaherty fuses documentary detail with a spare, unsentimental style to indict the landlord system and official policy while avoiding melodrama; the book’s power lies in its granular rendering of hunger, relief works and migration and in its portrayal of familial endurance. The novel helped shape 20th-century memory of the catastrophe.

[Cat 163]