Eamonn: A Strand Unbroken

By Edward McGrath

Intimate and sweeping, Eamonn traces one Irish family across four hundred years - the story of two men who could not have been more different. Bound together, father to son to son, by more than blood. It is a family tale, by turns heartbreaking and inspiring, that will resonate with anyone whose family looked to America for the promise of a better life.

Since the earliest days of Christianity in Ireland, pilgrims came from all over Europe. To an island. On a lake. At the edge of civilization. And for eight generations, one family had kept it. Into that family, around 1522, a boy named Miler was born with everything a child of that time could want, his path laid before he could walk it. Then the old certainties broke - church, crown, and the Gaelic order his family had lived by for centuries - and everything he was promised came apart.

Miler saw the storm coming and chose to ride it. He served two churches at once - a Catholic bishop and a Protestant archbishop - until Rome cast him out as a heretic. He charmed Queen Elizabeth, who admired and shielded him while he collected diocese after diocese, raised nine Catholic children in his Protestant palace, and lived like a Gaelic lord for fifty years - despised by both churches. At 100 years old he outlasted nearly everyone who judged him.

Three centuries later, on a tenant mountain farm in the long shadow of the famine, Edward was born with almost nothing - and inherited his mother's dying wish: give them a better life than this. At seventeen he crossed the Atlantic to discover that Boston had other plans - and that the tragedy he had hoped to leave behind had crossed with him. The better life she imagined came slowly, and at a terrible price.

Two men separated by everything - one who gambled all to keep the world he was given, one who left all to find a better one. What they shared was survival, and so did every generation between them: each starting a little further down than the last, with the same unreasonable expectation that this time it would hold.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H7SNK1C7
• ISBN13: 9798195499723
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"