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Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9780099497059
Format: Special Edition
ISBN number: 0099497050
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Page Count: 448
Printing Date: September 01, 2005
Publishing house: Vintage
Sale Popularity Level: 362938
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster, the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York. On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees. Among them is a maidservant with a devastating secret, bankrupt Lord Merridith and his family, an aspiring novelist, a maker of revolutionary ballads, all braving the Atlantic in search of a new home. Each is connected more deeply than they can possibly know. But a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution. The twenty-six day journey will see many lives end, others begin afresh. In a spellbinding story of tragedy and mercy, love and healing, the further the ship sails towards the Promised Land, the more her passengers seem moored to a past which will never let them go.
Amazon.com Review:
Joseph O'Connor's impressive historical novel, Star of the Sea, examines the unsettled personal tragedies among a group of interrelated characters and their difficulties in disregarding the past. Lord Merridith and his family board the titular ship in 1847, bound for New York, leaving behind an Ireland devastated by famine and strife. The family's beautiful nanny, Mary Duane, is with them, having fled a life of poverty, prostitution, and extreme tragedy. Another passenger, American journalist Grantley Dixon, is lured to America by business and his thinly veiled affair with Lady Merridith. Mary Duane discovers that Pius Mulvey, her former fiancé and the brother of her deceased husband, is among the overcrowded group of disease-ridden steerage passengers. A renowned thief and murderer, Mulvey abandoned Duane, only to return and sabotage her life in Ireland. Despised by his countrymen, Mulvey has been ordered by a group of steerage thugs to assassinate the demonized Merridith or face his own death.
Conflict is inevitable, but O'Connor is more interested in the complexity of history and relationships and how each makes reinvention and resolution impossible. O'Connor presents the story as a work of journalism written by Dixon, composed in the era's tabloid style, even including passages from the captain's register and crew interviews. These devices lend the work a sense of authenticity, reinforced by the author's intimate knowledge of the period and his evocative, realistic prose: 'At night one sensed the ship as absurdly out of its element, a creaking, leaking, incompetent concoction of oak and pitch and nails and faith, bobbing on a wilderness of viciously grey water which could explode at the slightest provocation.' O'Connor conveys a sense of immediacy and dimension in his ambitious story, providing this uncertain voyage with an ultimate sense of direction. --Ross Doll
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Rated by buyers 
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First off, as mentioned by another reviewer this is not a "summer reading" book. I agree with that person's comment and don't know why it would be included on a list like that. If you want a piece of summer fluff to read on the beach put this book down immediately and buy something by Sophie Kinsella. That being said, this is a book that you MUST read. It is best read like a scroll and you have to be willing to take time with it and allow the scroll to tell the story by unrolling at its own pace. The "Prologue" is terrible - I will admit that I was harboring negative thoughts on the pages yet to come while slogging through it - but you will understand why at the end when you have a better handle on the character who wrote it. Altogether a mesmerizing story - one of the best I have read this year.
Rated by buyers 
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This is one of those love or hate it books. The writing style is dense and borders on Dickens. The guy in the big dark coat and hat wandering the decks at night, etc. If you like older literature and the way it flows you'll probably love this book. Certainly the setting and period detail feels spot on. The dialogue and plot flow on the other hand is there but not driving you along. I picked up and put this book down 4 times before finishing. There was no sense of wonder whats happening next.
Rated by buyers 
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A wonderfully well woven tale of history, love and murder presented in a novel way, as a book within the book. The narrator of our story is G. Grantley Dixon an American newspaperman and passenger aboard The Star of the Sea traveling from Ireland to America in November of 1847.
Traveling in very first class with Dixon are the Earl David Merridith of Kingscourt, his wife Countess Laura, their two young sons and Mary Duane who they employ as their nanny.
Aboard the Star traveling in steerage, with many who are escaping the poverty of the potato famine, is Pius Mulvey our murderer, who is presented to us in alternating views. One human, vulnerable and lonely the other hateful conniving and evil. He is a smart man and in his youth begins composing and performing songs to earn a few shillings.
'Mulvey began to ponder something that would come to obsess him. Singers were admired by almost everyone; they were annalists, chroniclers, custodians, biographers. In a place where reading was almost unknown they carried a local memory like walking books.'
He later travels to London where he hones his skills as a thief and a con man. I loved the passage devoted to chronicling the various words for thieving.
'The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt. With rigour, with precision and most of all with poetry, they had categorised the language of thievery into sub-species, like fossilised old deacons baptising butterflies. Every kind of robbery had a verb of it's own. Breeds of embezzlement he never knew existed came to him very first as beautiful words. Beak-hunting; bit-faking; blagging; bonneting; broading; bug-hunting; buttoning; buzzing; capering; playing the crooked cross; dipping; dragging; fawney-dropping; fine-wiring; flimping; flying the blue pigeon; gammoning; grifting; half-inching; hoisting... Stealing in London sounded like dancing and Mulvey danced his way through town like a duke.'
The writing was lovely as was the story telling. We go back in time and discover the hardships of our main characters with vivid detail, through those stories the author creates a real sense of the passage of time.
I really enjoyed this book, it's dark and brooding, historical and moving with an unusual narration and a few surprises as well.
The ending was a little bit different from what I expected but not necessarily disappointing.
Rated by buyers -
Pius Mulvey is one of literature's GREAT characters. The meeting between the Meridith's, father and son, is as intense as anything I have read. If not for a weak ending, this would be a masterpiece. Never the less, its close.
Rated by buyers -
When the Irish "potato famine" of 1847 was finally over, two million residents of Ireland had died agonizing deaths, most of them from starvation. The events which led to the famine, the people who were directly affected by it, and the steps taken to ameliorate or escape it are the subjects of Joseph O'Connor's intense and heartfelt novel, Star of the Sea, named for the British-owned "famine ship" which is the center of the action here.
O'Connor presents four main characters who recall the pivotal experiences of their lives which lead them to make this fateful, 27-day journey. The reader becomes emotionally involved with their stories, acquiring a broad background in Irish social history--and its tragedie--in the process. Thomas David Nelson Merridith, Lord Kingscourt, is the ninth generation of his Protestant family to govern Kingscourt, with hundreds of workers dependent upon him. Now bankrupt, he and his family are going to America, first-class. Their nanny, Mary Duane, has recently joined the family, and her stories of her past loves, her marriage, and her loss of her own children illuminate the bleak prospects available to this warm and intelligent, but desperately poor, woman.
G. Grantley Dixon is a caricature of the liberal American do-gooder, whose reports about the plight of the Irish poor are influenced by his own socialism and by the reform-minded traditions of his family. Self-centered in his attitudes and limited in his social graces, he is detested by Merridith. Pius Mulvey is a mysterious ex-convict who comes from the same town as Merridith and Mary Duane, directly connected to both of them. One of over 400 passengers who have paid $8 per person for passage, he is crammed into the fetid and dangerous quarters known as "steerage," expected to stay alive on one quart of water a day and half a pound of hardtack.
O'Connor pulls out all the stops here in this big, broad melodrama, but an honesty of emotion and a fidelity to the facts here saves the novel from bathos and gives the reader cause for thought. Moments of both ineffable sadness and high drama arise, and O'Connor's imagery, especially his sense imagery, is arresting. Occasionally, his compression of time, for the sake of story, leads to anachronisms--several mentions of evolution, with parallels between monkeys and Irishmen, ignore the fact that Darwin's Evolution of the Species was not published until twelve years after this famine. Still, O'Connor presents a compelling story with many unforgettable details of Irish history. The ending is preachy, but the author does provide a follow-up on the characters after their arrival in America. The fact that at least one character becomes a politician (later accused of misappropriation of funds) will surprise no one accustomed to politics. Mary Whipple
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