At the heart of After the Voyage is an American immigrant family making its way forward on a road that is sometimes rocky and steep. From different counties in Ireland, Maggie Qualter and Richard Terrett both sail to America as young adults in 1870 after surviving Ireland’s Great Hunger as children. Maggie works as a maid for a wealthy family. Richard finds work in a tannery. After the death of the young wife he loves passionately, Richard marries Maggie with the help of a deceptive go-between who brews trouble in their marriage that never goes away. They raise three children in the midst of Irish American culture, the Catholic Church, and Richard’s battles for the workingman in the Knights of Labor. Their daughter Mary dreams of being a nun, while Josie seeks the freedom of big-city life in Boston. Neither reckons on the future she will face, Mary as a wife and mother of nine children and Josie as a single working woman. Tom escapes factory life by joining the Navy, manages to see the world in the midst of two wars, and comes home to marry his sweetheart and start a new life. Their stories are both remarkable and familiar to everyone whose ancestors made their way to and in America. The events in the Terretts’ lives are as they emerge from the public record. But their inner lives, their thoughts, their relationships, their words are imagined as a route to understanding these five complicated and fascinating people.

After the Voyage: An Irish American Story

Literature & Fiction

Murphy, Brenda

British & Irish

Bricktop Hill Books

George Monteiro never intended to write a memoir. But as the stories, poems, and sketches about his childhood in a Depression-Era New England mill town began to pile up, he found that he was writing a composite memoir of Valley Falls, Rhode Island and its Portuguese American community. Like his parents, many of these people had emigrated from rural Portugal to find work in the textile mills and build a life more hopeful and prosperous than the one they had left behind. Through its various forms of expression, this memoir seeks to understand Francisco and Augusta Monteiro, who found a life that was more difficult than they expected. But it also paints a vivid picture of the colorful characters whose varied adaptations to American life made the Portuguese community of Valley Falls both a unique environment in which to grow and one that is familiar to everyone in this nation of immigrants.

38 School Street: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Monteiro, George

Community & Culture

As the Crow Flies comes out of George Monteiro’s twenty-year fascination with the crows that have shared his Connecticut environs, giving much less attention to him than he gives to them. Part observation, part response, part meditation, these poems offer a range of poetic techniques to match the many moods and states of mind in which Monteiro has encountered the crows of Connecticut.

As the Crow Flies: Poems: 1996-2017

Poetry

Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683) is known as the founder of Rhode Island as a refuge for those who were seeking religious tolerance and for his advocacy of the land rights of Native Americans. This volume is the first to print the thirty-two poems that were included within the text of his Key into the Language of America (1643) as a collection of poetry eminently worthy of reading and study in itself. In his critical Introduction, poet and American Literature scholar George Monteiro makes the case for Williams as America’s first poet in English.

Roger Williams Thirty-Two Poems (Windham Critical Editions)

Williams, Roger

United States

For the twenty years of her acting career, Carlotta Monterey was counted among the most beautiful women in America. Beginning life in 1888 as Hazel Tharsing, the daughter of a California fruit farmer, she grew up determined to matter in the world. At seventeen, she left Oakland to study acting in London. She married a British aristocrat and divorced him three years later to go back on the stage. After a liaison with a wealthy banker and marriages to the twenty-year-old son of her mother’s lover in San Francisco and to a famous artist in New York, she married America’s greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill, a stormy union that endured until his death. In each part of her life, Hazel reinvented herself to pursue a new ambition. Intensely shy, she learned to meet the world in the character of the actress Carlotta Monterey, by far her greatest acting role. Becoming Carlotta is a biographical novel, an imagined narrative built on a base of facts with the goal of understanding Hazel Tharsing and what it meant for her to live her fascinating life as Carlotta Monterey. Along the way, it takes us to the cities and the back country of the Old West, to Edwardian London and an English country-house life reminiscent of Downton Abbey’s, to the Broadway theater in its golden age and the tough reality of the actor’s life on the road, and to bohemian Greenwich Village and Manhattan’s arty Smart Set in the 1920s. Through it all, Carlotta is an outsized presence, inventing endless new faces to meet the challenges that life throws her way and turning from every defeat and disillusionment to look ahead with newfound energy and determination.

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Genre Fiction

When Light Breaks Through: A Salem Witch Trials Story

When Light Breaks Through takes us beyond the witch trials to tell a riveting, expansive story of what happened in Salem Village.\n1692. In what begins as a daring adolescent game, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam becomes a ringleader of the “afflicted children” who accuse scores of people of witchcraft, resulting in twenty executions and untold misery for those imprisoned and their families in Massachusetts and Maine.\n1697. Joseph Green, a young schoolteacher who is in love and eager to marry, takes on the Salem Village ministry that no one else wants and sets about mending the bitter discord that divides the congregation and the village. With his wife Elizabeth, he gradually earns the respect and trust of his congregation, eventually taking some dramatic actions that move the people to confront their future together as a community.\n1706. With Joseph’s help, Ann delves into the darkness of her past, uncovering startling truths about her family and her childhood motivations. Standing before the neighbors whose loved ones she has sent to jail or to their deaths, she makes an appeal that could finally unite the people in forgiveness.\nThe compelling narrative takes us from the girlhood friendship of Ann and Abigail Williams, the other ringleader in the witch trials, to the intense, often shocking drama of the trials themselves, and to the small farming village on the edge of the frontier in 17th-century Massachusetts where Joseph Green pursues his quest to unite a bitterly divided people.\nWhen Light Breaks Through is fact-based historical fiction. Its characters are based on real people. Its account of the witch trials and the public events surrounding them is grounded in public documents and historical research.

When Light Breaks Through takes us beyond the witch trials to tell a riveting, expansive story of what happened in Salem Village. In 1692, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam becomes notorious as a ringleader of the "afflicted children" whose accusations of witchcraft against the people of Massachusetts and Maine lead to twenty executions and untold misery. Five years later, Joseph Green, a young schoolteacher who is in love and eager to marry, takes on the ministry of Salem Village that no one else wants and sets about mending the bitter discord in the church and the village that the witch trials have intensified. As Joseph marries Elizabeth and they enter the life of the village, he gradually earns the respect and trust of his congregation, eventually taking some dramatic actions that move the people to confront their future together as a community.\nNine years after Joseph's arrival, Ann asks his help, seeking forgiveness and the chance to become part of the community that has shunned her since the devastating effects of her actions during the witch trials. Together, they delve into the darkness of her past, uncovering startling truths about her family and her childhood motivations. Standing before the neighbors whose loved ones she has sent to jail or to their deaths, she makes an appeal that could finally unite the people in forgiveness.\nThe compelling narrative takes us from what begin as adolescent games invented by Ann's friend Abigail Williams, the other ringleader in the witch trials, to the intense, often shocking drama of the trials themselves, and to the small farming village in 17th-century Massachusetts where Joseph pursues his quest to unite a bitterly divided people.\nWhen Light Breaks Through is a fact-based historical novel. Its characters are based on real people. Its account of the witch trials and the public events surrounding them is grounded in public documents and historical research.

Literary

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Books by Bricktop Hill Books

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Bricktop Hill Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

After the Voyage: An Irish American Story

38 School Street: A Memoir

As the Crow Flies: Poems: 1996-2017

Roger Williams Thirty-Two Poems (Windham Critical Editions)

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

When Light Breaks Through: A Salem Witch Trials Story

When Light Breaks Through: A Salem Witch Trials Story