As a teenager, Violet O'Halloran spent a summer at a Catholic boarding school in Northern Ireland, emptied of all other students but one: Indira Sharma, a blind girl from India with an extraordinary story. The beautiful but ultimately catastrophic friendship that formed between the two girls would go on to haunt Violet for years. A decade later, Violet meets an Irishman, Emmett Fitzroy, at a party in New York City and is swept into an intense romance that brings her back to Ireland. While there, she unearths the stunning answers to mysteries left unresolved when Indira vanished from her life. Set in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, Stranger from Across the Sea explores place, displacement, and exile and the ways in which the personal and the political are inseparable. At its heart, this is a story about a passionate friendship between two singular young women, one that transcends the limits of time and distance.
Regina McBride Book order
Regina McBride crafts poetry that delves into the intricacies of relationships and the human condition. Her verses frequently explore themes of nature, womanhood, and intimate connections. With a distinctive voice and profound insight into human psychology, her work offers readers an engaging and introspective journey. Her writing celebrates the beauty and fragility of life through evocative imagery and language.




- 2024
- 2016
Ghost Songs: A Memoir
- 350 pages
- 13 hours of reading
A searingly beautiful coming-of-age memoir about a girl who begins to see her parents' ghosts after their tragic deaths. An Oprah.com Editor's Pick and a Paris Review Staff Pick Eighteen-year-old Regina McBride is haunted by the ghosts of her parents. Her father visits her—he is desperate, but she doesn’t know how to help him. Her mother is a quiet figure, obscured by light—a flash at the foot of the bed. Regina, raised Irish Catholic and with the ironclad belief that some sins are unforgivable, fears her parents are trapped between worlds, forever punished after they committed suicide within a few months of each other. Terrorized by these visitations and flattened by grief, Regina slowly begins her hazardous journey to recovery. Lyrical and lovely, harrowing and haunting, Ghost Songs charts her struggle to separate madness from imagination and sorrow from devastation. From New York to the desert of New Mexico to the shores of Ireland, Regina searches for herself, her home, and a way to return to the family that remains. Ghost Songs is an exploration of memory, a meditation on love and loss, and, in the end, a celebration of life and the living.