Stephen Jaques
An Accidental Author
Clonfert
..... It took one hundred and eighty years to heal the source.
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Status - Published
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Wordcount 70,526
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Pages 324
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Available - Amazon
County Cork, 1845. Brigid Moynahan smells something wrong in the potato beds and writes it down, because someone should.
Illinois, 2025. Erin stands at her back door with a cup of coffee and smells the same thing — something she cannot identify and cannot get rid of.
One hundred and eighty years apart, two women keep a diary.
Brigid could read and write at a time when most of her neighbours could not. She uses it to record what the blight takes, and the names of the people it takes with it, because she has decided that someone has to write them down.
Erin keeps hers because she has been given a diagnosis and a number, and the number is not large. She has a husband, two children, three acres outside Paxton, and a vegetable patch that has never given her any trouble until now.
Neither woman knows the other exists. But their entries fall on the same dates, and between them runs a thread that reaches from a townland in Duhallow to a farmhouse in Ford County — a cloth doll with a blue ribbon, a cross woven from rushes, and a name nobody has spoken aloud in six generations.
When Erin begins searching for where her family came from, she finds a woman who wrote everything down and was never read.
Clonfert is a novel about famine and inheritance, about what survives an ocean and six generations, and about the difference between being remembered and being known.
Some things cannot remain silent.