Carol Birch Books In Order

Novels

Life in the Palace (1988)
The Fog Line (1989)
The Unmaking (1992)
Songs of the West (1994)
Little Sister (1998)
Come Back, Paddy Riley (1999)
Turn Again Home (2003)
In a Certain Light (2004)
The Naming of Eliza Quinn (2005)
Scapegallows (2007)
Jamrach’s Menagerie (2011)
Orphans of the Carnival (2016)
Cold Boy’s Wood (2021)
Shadow Girls (2022)

Novels Book Covers

Carol Birch Books Overview

Little Sister

Cathy Wren, aged 37, lives alone in a small town, surviving on waitressing and piano teaching. Nursing her quiet, drab life, she keeps memories of her tumultuous past at bay until one stray remnant of that old life knocks on her front door. Suddenly, Cathy is thrown into a weird and haphazard journey that turns into much more than a search for the Little Sister she hasn’t seen for ten years. A remarkable novel about life and death, fact and fiction, desire, envy, families, and forgiveness.

Turn Again Home

Gorton, Manchester. 1930. Greyhound racing at Belle Vue, the buses going up and down Hyde Road, the siren of Peacock’s foundry going off every night at six. This is Bessie and Sam Holloway’s place, home for Nell and little brother Bobby and older step child Violet. Precious visits from Dad’s sister Benny, a Queen of the music hall trailing clouds of glory and whisky, provide infrequent brushes with glamour. ‘Alright for some,’ grunts Bessie. Nell grows up to work in a factory and there, from the tailgate of a truck in the yard, she first hears fellow factory worker Harry Caplin play trombone break on the old jazz classic, Clarinet Marmalade. Harry’s talent will take him far and introduce him to such jazz legends as Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden; but not as far as poor feckless Bobby, who finds himself fighting in the jungles of Malaya. Spanning the twentieth century, this is a poignant story about a brother and a sister and three generations of a northern working class family.

The Naming of Eliza Quinn

In the late 1960s, in the hollow of an ancient oak tree beyond a derelict cottage in Cork, were found the bones of a three year old girl. It was thought that they dated back to the time of the great potato famine of the mid 1800s. The bones were discovered by an American woman, who had inherited the cottage which had lain empty and broken for 40 years. Local searches reveal that the house had originally belonged to The Quinns. Eliza Quinn was their baby. This is a story that speaks of generations and of landscapes abandoned villages, famine graves, old potato ridges sinking back into the earth, traces of a population that fell by two and a half million in less than 10 years. But above all, it is the story of the Quinn family. And it is Carol Birch’s tour de force.

Scapegallows

As the valued servant of a wealthy family and a friend of criminals, Margaret leads a double life that inevitably brings about her downfall, and she is sentenced to hang not once, but twice. But she escapes the gallows and is transported with other convicts to Australia. This wonderful adventure story takes inspiration from the life of the real Margaret Catchpole a woman who lived by her wits, twice a Scapegallows.

Jamrach’s Menagerie

SHORTLISTED for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for FictionA thrilling and powerful novel about a young boy lured to sea by the promise of adventure and reward, with echoes of Great Expectations, Moby Dick, and The Voyage of the Narwhal. Jamrach’s Menagerie tells the story of a nineteenth century street urchin named Jaffy Brown. Following an incident with an escaped tiger, Jaffy goes to work for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed importer of exotic animals, alongside Tim, a good but sometimes spitefully competitive boy. Thus begins a long, close friendship fraught with ambiguity and rivalry. Mr. Jamrach recruits the two boys to capture a fabled dragon during the course of a three year whaling expedi tion. Onboard, Jaffy and Tim enjoy the rough brotherhood of sailors and the brutal art of whale hunting. They even succeed in catching the reptilian beast. But when the ship s whaling venture falls short of expecta tions, the crew begins to regard the dragon seething with feral power in its cage as bad luck, a feeling that is cruelly reinforced when a violent storm sinks the ship. Drifting across an increasingly hallucinatory ocean, the sur vivors, including Jaffy and Tim, are forced to confront their own place in the animal kingdom. Masterfully told, wildly atmospheric, and thundering with tension, Jamrach s Mena gerie is a truly haunting novel about friendship, sacrifice, and survival.