Queenstown Books
Queenstown, County Cork, Ireland . April 1912 Twelve-year-old Harp Delaney is an unusual child, quiet and intelligent far beyond her years. She would rather spend her days in the library of the grand Georgian house that she sees as her home than playing on the streets with other children. Her mother, Rose, is the reserved and ladylike housekeeper at the Cliff House. The local women envy her grace and poise while the men admire her beauty. She behaves not as a servant should, but as someone who belongs at the ancestral home of eccentric loner Henry Devereaux. Nobody ever visits the Cliff House, but Harp, Rose and Henry have a happy life together, each accepting the idiosyncrasies of the others. The day Titanic sails from Queenstown, taking with it the hopes and dreams of so many, Harp’s life too is devastated. The small port town is shaken to its foundations at the loss of the unsinkable ship, but the revelation of a long-held secret means that Harp and Rose have a much more pressing issue to solve, one that could destroy them if they cannot find a solution. Unexpectedly, fate takes a hand, and mother and daughter find themselves thrown a lifeline, one that inextricably links them to the stories of men, women and children for whom Queenstown was the last-ever sight of Ireland as they sailed away to new lands and new lives. Last Port of Call is the first book in The Queenstown Series.
Queenstown, Co Cork. Ireland. 1916 Sixteen-year-old Harp Devereaux is growing up in a country in turmoil. Her mother Rose is struggling to navigate single parenthood, run the Cliff House, and stay out of the way of the authorities.Harp’s uncle, Ralph Devereaux, has only one thing on his mind.The port of Queenstown bustles with activity as people traverse the Atlantic either in search of new lives on foreign shores or returning to old familiar ones in Ireland. The Cliff House is fast gaining a reputation as a wonderful place to stay, and the business is going from strength to strength. Rose and Harp have turned their fortunes around and for the first time they are prosperous and independent. But all is not well. Civil and military unrest across the country in the wake of the Easter Rising is threatening to bubble over, and everyone is on edge. The British soldiers are making their presence felt in unpleasant ways, and the return of Ralph Devereaux to what he sees as his ancestral home is poses a serious threat.Just as they are managing the situation, a series of unforeseen events places both Harp and her mother in grave peril. Ralph suddenly holds all the power and is not afraid to wield it. They desperately need help, and there’s only one place they can go to get it.From a tense Queenstown to the vibrant Irish community in Boston, from wartime Liverpool, to the streets of Dublin seething with revolution, The West’s Awake continues the spellbinding Queenstown Story.
Queenstown, County Cork. 1920 For twenty-year-old Harp Devereaux, life should be idyllic. At university, she feels for the first time in her life that she belongs, her mother Rose is running the Cliff House as a successful business, and her childhood sweetheart JohnJoe is by her side, but the storm clouds of war grow ever darker. For eight hundred years Ireland has made numerous bids for her freedom but now, at last, liberation from British rule is tantalisingly close, if the men and women of the revolution can just hold on. Harp, her family, and her friends find themselves in the thick of the fight, but the Crown Forces are not the only enemy. A sinister force from the past is lurking and will stop at nothing to exact his revenge. The Harp and the Rose is the third book in the Queenstown Series.
New York City, 1922 Harp Devereaux is torn. Part of her desperately wants to return to Ireland to finish what she and her family and friends started, and to witness the departure of the British forces from Ireland after eight hundred long years. But the other part finds life in America during the Roaring Twenties too exciting to trade for the sleepy streets of County Cork. She and JohnJoe are united and determined to sample all that life after the Great War has to offer, but life Stateside is not as free and easy as Harp first imagines and soon she finds herself longing for the simplicity of her homeland. She wants to live life on her own terms but life is never simple, on either side of the Atlantic, and there are sinister forces at work, determined to bring them all down..