We're thrilled to announce the release of this engaging first novel by Chicago author Roger Higgins. In 1844, Ireland is on the eve of the Great Hunger and 15-year-old Billy's father has just died in an English prison in Dublin. Billy is cast from cousin Séamas's house and forced to make his way to America. Aboard a ramshackle old ship, Billy befriends a destitute Irish peasant and her daughter, and together they endure a harsh passage to New York, America's greatest city. When they finally arrive, they get separated as they debark, and Billy searches tirelessly for them in the brutal Five Points, the city's greatest slum, ground zero in the collision of Americans, ex-slaves, and Irish refugees. Billy eventually finds them and they plan their future together, but that future is taken in a cruel stroke, and nothing will ever be the same.
"Higgins is a bare-knuckled storyteller. In this brawny novel, he transports us to the hardscrabble lives of mid-1800s New York Irish immigrants. Though each day brings a new brawl for survival, under Higgins's deft touch, the heartbeat of tenderness, love, and even racial enlightenment pulses through 'Gotham's' brutal veins." —Gary Buslik, author of A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, and Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago
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