A look at the history and legends of ancient Ireland. Beginning in 2000 B.C., when Stone Age farmers built some of the largest and most spectacular Neolithic monuments in Europe, to 1167 A.D, when the Norman invasion placed Ireland under English control.

When matchmaker Kate Begley's husband, U.S. intelligence officer Charles Miller disappears, she enlists Ben MacCarthy's help in finding him. They travel to France and Germany, where they stumble across the German army about to launch its last-gasp assault in the Ardennes and end up questioning the wisdom of remaining neutral in the face of overwhelming evil.

A sweeping panorama steeped in the tragedy and glory that is Ireland, epitomizes the power and richness of Rutherford's storytelling magic. The saga begins in tribal, pre-Christian Ireland during the reign of the fierce and mighty High kings at Tara, with the fate of two lovers, the princely Conall and the ravishing Deirdre, whose travails cleverly echo the ancient Celtic legend of Cuchulainn.

Text and photographs introduce some of the beauties of the Emerald Isle as well as facts about its way of life.

Winter, AD 670: a feast day, held by King Colgu, at first seems like a joyful---and pesceful---celebration, when it is suddenly interrupted by the entrance of a religieux who claims he has an important message for the king. The intruder approaches the throne, lunging toward the king. He kills Colgu's bodyguard and wounds the king himself, putting him on the verge of death. Though the assassin is quickly slain, the questions on everyone's mind are...

This eloquent, searing, and haunting account of the great famine will shock and move the reader, evoke compassion and furry, and add substance to Ireland's bitter, undying hatred for England. Ireland was, and is, too close to England. Queen Elizabeth, in the 16th century, sent military expeditions to subdue the dissident Catholic, fiercely independent clans across the Irish Sea. In the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell, with pitiless fervor, raised an...

AD 664. Sister Fidelma finds herself in the seaport of Genua, en route from Rome back to her native Cashel. Her old teacher, Brother Ruadan, lies dying in the abbey of Bobium, an isolated abbey in a disturbed country where even the Christians are in bloody conflict with one another and the worship of the pagan gods often prevails. Fidelma is determined to see Brother Ruadan before he dies. But from the moment she enters the beautiful valley of Trebbia,...

Counseling a hostile Irish delegation to the Celtic church of 670 A.D., Fidelma of Cashel is embroiled in a politically tenacious investigation when one of the delegates is found murdered, a case that is complicated by the theft of a priceless reliquary.

"National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty delivers a mediation on belonging, fatherhood, and nationalism, through a series of letters to his estranged Irish father. The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up soon after he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. He loved his mother but longed for his father, who only occasionally returned from Ireland for visits. He was happy...