Hunger in the Stones
by Billy Conn
An already impoverished Island nation.
A people who have suffered at the hands of conquerors for centuries and remain occupied by them, their beliefs and worship despised and both culture and language marginalized.
Whatever the final truth proves to be this was also a people with a folk memory of a time when their nation was one of learning and peace now reduced to a struggle to survive the oppression and degradation.
Now imagine what would happen if the one crop that sustains them failed.
A million would die of disease and starvation, nearly two million forced to leave their own shores while the Empire of their occupier feasts and prospers.
There is no need to imagine this. That country was Ireland between 1845 and 1850 during the Great Hunger.
This is the defining backdrop to ‘Hunger in the Stones’, a novel that seeks to explore this too-great-to-be imagined horror through the lives of some of imagined ordinary people.