I am pleased to announce that my new book, Learning to be Irish, is published. Many thanks to Siglum Publishing for taking this book into their fold, and to all those that have made it look so wonderful. Maggie Drury designed the cover image; Mark Holihan designed the cover and Bob Carling did the typesetting and internal design. Thanks are also due to fellow/sister second-generation Irish writers John O’Donoghue and S.M.Jenkin for their endorsements.
This book has been a long time coming, and much of the content is deeply personal. Learning to be Irish explores my Irish heritage in memoir, poetry and short fiction. Like an artist drawing several sketches, I have worked the material in different forms over the years, staying curious, looking for meanings.
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.
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
I shall be launching Learning to be Irish on Saturday 19 July 2025, 1.00 – 2.30 p.m. at Sun Pier House in Chatham. There will be readings, music and books! I hope to have several events in the coming months, and am open to invitations as a guest writer.
The book is available from the usual online retailers, but can I ask that UK readers order copies from me? Small presses like Siglum Publishing, and their authors, make a small profit from direct sales, and only a tiny amount from Amazon.
I shall be sending out orders from mid-May. Details of how to order are here: Learning to be Irish
