Learning to be Irish

By: Maria C McCarthy

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Paperback | 25 April 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
204 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.32 x 12.7 x 1.19

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Learning to be Irish showcases the best new and collected writings of a child of Irish migrants. Raised in Surrey in the 1960s and '70s, 'the filling in the sandwich' of a family of five children, Maria C. McCarthy dances to Irish showbands, learns rebel songs at an uncle's knee, hears home truths, half-truths and white lies from the women that gather in her mother's kitchen, and learns to be English after the IRA bombs two pubs in Guildford. Learning to be Irish is a search for identity, a chronicle of a lost generation, and a yearning for truths that may never be known.

Industry Reviews

Maria C. McCarthy's Learning To Be Irish, comprising poems, stories, and memoir, is a welcome addition to a wave of second-generation Irish writers born in England. McCarthy is a particularly fine poet, and I recommend her sequence 'Mitchelstown' to all who are interested in the delicate relations between native and exile. Learning To Be Irish can take its place alongside the work of such writers as Ian Duhig, Shane MacGowan, and Martina Evans. A terrific book.

John O'Donoghue, author of Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, The King From Over The Water and The Servants and Other Strange Stories

Quietly devastating. A mature and truthful exploration of complex emotions, conflicting loyalties, identity, belonging. Through her mastery of different forms of writing: poetry, story, memoir, McCarthy shows us the beating heart of the second-generation Irish in England.

S.M. Jenkin, author of Fire in the Head and Unspeakable, and co-editor of Inspired by Six Women who Shook the World

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