West's Awake

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.

Jean Grainger is a USA Today bestselling author from Cork, Ireland. She writes engaging and intriguing Irish historical fiction as well as heart-warming contemporary novels frequently found on the Amazon bestseller lists. Her style has been compared to the late great Maeve Binchy, of whom she was a huge fan. Before writing she was a tour guide of her beloved Ireland, a history lecturer at a university and a teacher at a secondary school. (She also tried selling things but the less said about that the better). She loved all of those careers but has finally opted for spending most of every day in pyjamas making things up, surrounded by empty tea cups and crumbs. She lives in an Irish stone cottage and is married to a lovely fella altogether, has four magnificent children, and two micro-dogs that are cute but clueless.