Where The Heart should Be. Sarah Crossan ( paperback Feb 2025)
£8.99
This novel is written in verse. Please don't let that put you off - not only is it a lovely read for everyone, it kind of intensifies the emotions and is absolutely perfect for slow, reluctant or dyslexic readers
Ireland, 1846. Nell is working as a scullery maid in the kitchen of the Big House.
Once she loved school and books and dreaming. But there's not much choice of work when the land grows food that rots in the earth. Now she is scrubbing, peeling, washing, sweeping for Sir Philip Wicken, the man who owns her home, her family's land, their crops, everything.
His dogs are always well fed, even as famine sets in. Upstairs in the Big House, where Nell is forbidden to enter, is Johnny Browning, newly arrived from England: the young nephew who will one day inherit it all. And as hunger and disease run rampant all around them, a spark of life and hope catches light when Nell and Johnny find each other.
A beautiful, perfect, moving read’ – Cecelia Ahern, author of PS, I Love YouThe outstanding novel from the Carnegie Medal-winning, former Laureate na nÓg Sarah Crossan; thought-provoking and moving, it explores love and family during The Great Hunger.