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Tipperary: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Frank Delaney
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 63732
Media: Paperback
Pages: 464
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0812975944
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780812975949
ASIN: 0812975944
Publication Date: June 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: 21 edge and corner wear,no writing in book
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Product Description
“My wooing began in passion, was defined by violence and circumscribed by land; all these elements molded my soul.” So writes Charles O’Brien, the unforgettable hero of bestselling author Frank Delaney’s extraordinary new novel–a sweeping epic of obsession, profound devotion, and compelling history involving a turbulent era that would shape modern Ireland.
Born into a respected Irish-Anglo family in 1860, Charles loves his native land and its long-suffering but irrepressible people. As a healer, he travels the countryside dispensing traditional cures while soaking up stories and legends of bygone times–and witnessing the painful, often violent birth of land-reform measures destined to lead to Irish independence.
At the age of forty, summoned to Paris to treat his dying countryman–the infamous Oscar Wilde–Charles experiences the fateful moment of his life. In a chance encounter with a beautiful and determined young Englishwoman, eighteen-year-old April Burke, he is instantly and passionately smitten–but callously rejected. Vowing to improve himself, Charles returns to Ireland, where he undertakes the preservation of the great and abandoned estate of Tipperary, in whose shadow he has lived his whole life–and which, he discovers, may belong to April and her father.
As Charles pursues his obsession, he writes the “History” of his own life and country. While doing so, he meets the great figures of the day, including Charles Parnell, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. And he also falls victim to less well-known characters–who prove far more dangerous. Tipperary also features a second “historian:” a present-day commentator, a retired and obscure history teacher who suddenly discovers that he has much at stake in the telling of Charles’s story.
In this gloriously absorbing and utterly satisfying novel, a man’s passion for the woman he loves is twinned with his country’s emergence as a nation. With storytelling as sweeping and dramatic as the land itself, myth, fact, and fiction are all woven together with the power of the great nineteenth-century novelists. Tipperary once again proves Frank Delaney’s unrivaled mastery at bringing Irish history to life.
Praise for Frank Delaney’s TIPPERARY:
“[T]he narrative moves swiftly and surely…A sort of Irish Gone With the Wind, marked by sly humor, historical awareness and plenty of staying power.” — Kirkus Reviews
“[A]nother meticulously researched journey…Delaney’s careful scholarship and compelling storytelling bring it uniquely alive. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred)
“Sophisticated and creative.” — Booklist
“Delaney’s confident storytelling and quirky characterizations enrich a fascinating and complex period of Irish history.” — Publishers Weekly
“Read just a few sentences of Frank Delaney’s writing and you’ll see why National Public Radio called him ‘the world’s most eloquent man.’” — Kirkus Reviews, “Big Book Guide 2007”
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 A Wonderful Look at Ireland October 27, 2007
Jean Brandt (Richfield, WI United States)
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
"Tipperary" it is safe to say, is one of the most enjoyable works of historical fiction I have read.
At first I had a bit of a struggle with Delaney's style. Delaney told his tale from alternating points of view. He often switched points of view in the middle of a page and without any distiction other than the "voice" of the narrator. I have participated in enough reading groups to know that there are readers who would have issues with this. To them I would advise that they "hang in there" because the story is well worth the effort. It doesn't take long for Delaney's voices to become distinct.
The author's format allows for a very large perspective on the lives of his characters. I loved this about the book.
Delaney also has a very low key sense of humor which I really enjoy,very subtle but very funny when he uses it.
I didn't know very much about Ireland when I started this novel. I tend to shy away from sob stories or "poor me" type books. It was a wonderful surprise to hear about Ireland and the Irish people from Delaney's perspective. The story was heartfelt and not at all sappy or over dramatized.
After completing this book, I will no doubt read Delaney's first novel titled "Ireland". The author tells a good story in a captivating style.
 A Major Disappointment November 22, 2007
Douglas S. Wood (Monona, WI)
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
I enjoyed Frank Delaney's first novel Ireland : A Novel so much that I went on record as favoring it over Edward Rutherfurd's sweeping epic of Irish historical fiction. After reading 'Tipperary' I wonder if that earlier judgment was wrong or whether Delaney's second book has really fallen that far short.
'Tipperary' centers around an Irish itinerant folk doctor named Charles O'Brien who falls in love at the age of 40 with a young English woman named April Burke in Paris, but the love is decidedly unrequited. The telling of his story is choppy with multiple narrative voices each in a different time period. Delaney has O'Brien meet numerous lights of Irish literature and politics of the late 19th century - among others he meets Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Shaw, Parnell, de Valera, and Collins. Annoyingly most of these people make only brief cameo appearances and add nothing to the story. What is the point of the name-dropping?
At nearly the half way mark, the book finally gets a purpose, albeit a rather unlikely one as O'Brien and April Burke join forces after a fashion to bring Tipperary Castle, an Anglo Irish Great House in O'Brien's neighborhood back to its former glory. With the Irish Civil War in the background, Delaney also finally delivers a little sustained history.
`Tipperary' disappoints and only in part due to high expectations based on Delaney's `Ireland'. Having waded through 200 pages of tedium as Delaney struggled to pull the story together, this reader found it hard to work up much of an interest in what happened to Charles O'Brien and April Burke and the bloody stupid `castle'.
Once I find an author whose work I enjoy I tend to go back to them again and again - like Edward Rutherfurd, for example: The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga, Sarum: The Novel of England, London: The Novel. `Tipperary' has put readers on notice to exercise caution in picking up a Delaney novel not called 'Ireland'.
 Tipperary November 17, 2007
clamairy (CT, USA)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Played out against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent periods of Irish history, Tipperary doesn't read like a history lesson, yet it paints a vivid picture of those brutal days. If it is a love story, then it is a tale of the Irish and their great love of the land, revealed through journal entries, some penned more than half a century apart. This device works well, if a bit awkwardly in a few places. The overall effect is one of a chorus of voices weaving a complex tale of turmoil, with the predominant theme being the people's great passion for Ireland itself. The romances between people mostly take a back seat here, thankfully.
We see predominantly through the eyes of Charles O'Brien, who has an almost Forest Gump-like ability to meet and interact with nearly every important player who graced that period of Irish history. His encounters include that tragic genius Oscar Wilde, the legendary Charles Parnell, those brilliant writers William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, and culminate with his interactions with many crucial participants in the battle for Irish Home Rule, including Michael Collins himself. While I initially felt these meeting to be too contrived, I came to the realization that a member of the Irish upper class in that period could indeed have interacted with many of the history makers of those days.
I could barely put the book down while finishing off the final third of it, and having finished, I am left not only with a longing to fill those woefully large gaps in my knowledge of Irish History, but also with a desire to seek out more works by Frank Delaney.
a Lavish look at Ireland January 18, 2008
John Ottinger III
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Ireland. The word conjures up many images. Green fields, low mountains, picturesque tranquility; rough and tough fighting men, beautiful ladies, and fair haired children; great authors, great fighters, and a fight for nationhood that spanned centuries; each image a part of Ireland, each depicting a land of many facets. To most readers, Ireland is the home or birthplace of Yeats and Shaw, Wilde and Joyce. The Irish urge to create beauty from within their indomitable spirit led to many a feat in all spheres of life.
It is this spirit that Frank Delaney captures in Tipperary, his third US publication. Delaney is himself an emigre from Ireland, born in the very town where the novel is set. His knowledge of the town and its environs comes through clearly, as does his experience as a BBC broadcaster and judge for the Man Booker Prize.
Tipperary is told primarily through the voices of two men, separated by a generation, one living at the dawn of the 20th century, and the other at the dawn of the 21st. They are both historians, one writing a personal and contemporary history, the other a commentator on the first. Charles O'Brien, the former of these, is a man of Victorian Ireland, a gentleman born in 1860 to an Ireland depopulated by famine. It is from him that the reader receives most of the story. O'Brien tells of the tumultuous times in which he lived by keeping a personal journal, something he calls a "small personal history of Ireland in my lifetime - a life of love and pain and loss and trouble and delight and knowledge." The other historian, Michael Nugent, discovered Charles O'Brien's text and interrupts the narrative often to explain or verify O'Brien's assertions or historical accuracy. However, unbeknownst to Nugent, he has a personal stake in the story, one which develops as the plot progresses.
The plot follows O'Brien as he pursues April Burke, a woman twenty years his junior with whom he as fallen in love, but who vehemently rejects him. In the process, he meets with famous Irish notables of the period such as George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Charles Stewart Parnell, and even Michael Collins, highly esteemed leader of the Irish Republican Army. April is discovered to be the heir to Tipperary Castle (which had lain unclaimed for fifty years) in a time when the landed aristocracy is greatly out of favor in Ireland. Many of the Irish wish the return of their ancestral lands to the people and civil and military unrest are on the rise. Against this backdrop April pursues her land, and Charles pursues her. Ultimately, it is a love story, one of a man for a woman, and of a people for its land.
The novel itself is beautifully written. Delaney switches back and forth from the contemporary history of the late 1800s and early 1900s by Charles O'Brien and the commentary on that text by Nugent. Some readers will find the switches difficult to follow, but this reviewer did not. Delaney made sure within the first sentence, sometimes even the first word, to ensure that the reader knew he had moved from Charles O'Brien's history to Nugent's commentary and vice versa. Other voices are later introduced by Nugent to help explain the circumstances surrounding O'Brien's life such as O'Brien's mother, Joe Harney, and even April herself.
Delaney has written a novel which delves into the psyches of the various Irish and Anglo-Irish of the period. Their desire for nationhood and the love of the people for their land are a driving force within the story. And yet, he has made it all deeply personal by telling us of the story of Charles and April. In their relationship, we see Ireland reflected.
The first two chapters spend a great deal of time on back story and setting, and readers may find it slow and difficult to read, as Delaney writes O'Brien using a Victorian style. Since O'Brien's reminisces fill the majority of the first two chapters and the first part of the third, those unschooled in Victorian language may dislike the tone and voice. It is necessary to set the stage for the mystery that comes next, and the reader would be well advised to pay attention. In chapter three, more voices are introduced, and the plot twists and turns in such a way as to make a mystery that is both intriguing and beguiling.
Delaney is a master of the voice. Each of his characters is unique in the way they write, from O'Brien and his Victorian style, to Nugent and his historian's need for accuracy. From the random and chaotic nature of April Burke's letters, to the colloquial voice of Joe Harney, each character sees Ireland in a different light, and so illuminates an era of much personal and political turmoil. It is "a story of a passionate romance within an epic struggle for nationhood," told in a variety of perspectives, but always realizing that history is always personal, and never objective.
I highly recommend Tipperary. It is storytelling as only the Irish can tell.
 needs a good editor! January 22, 2008
Mara Zonderman (NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A brief summary: at the turn of the 20th century, Charles O'Brien begins to write his personal "History", and continues to do so into the 1920s. A generation later, our narrator find Charles's "History" and embarks on a quest to find the full story of Charles's life, and his connection to it. Charles tells us of living through the increasing turbulence of Ireland and of his small role in history. The crux of his story, however, is his love-at-first-sight response to April Burke, who rejects him almost as quickly as he fell in love with her. Despite this, the two restore April's ancestral home at Tipperary to its previous glory. When the castle is complete, they marry, and have a son. Shortly thereafter, they are both killed in a fire which destroys the castle, and the baby is adopted by a nearby family. Interspersed with this story, are the narrator's present-day (more or less) reflections. He slowly begins to "sense" a connection to the story, and lo! it turns out that he was the baby rescued from the fire.
I have one good thing to say about this book: I actually enjoyed reading about this time period in Irish history. It was interested to read about an event from Charles's perspective and then to read the narrator's somewhat more scholarly portrayal of the same event in history.
Alas, the rest of what I have to say about this book is much more negative.
First, I sometimes I had a hard time distinguishing who was speaking. Like other readers, I would have appreciated some visual clue, other than a single line -- something that would have indicated who the new speaker was. But it was more than that. I realized about halfway through the book that Charles's voice and the narrator's were almost indistinguishable.
Second, I almost drowned under the heavy foreshadowing, not all of which was followed through. By having his narrator admit that he has already read Charles's "History" all the way through even as he comments on it, Delaney hopes the reader will excuse this foreshadowing, but it is simply too transparent. Foreshadowing should be a hint, not a cudgel.
Third, the story had too many characters in it to be manageable. By the end of the book, the reader is supposed to find the past interactions of some characters significant, but I couldn't even remember who they were!
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