The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly

Famine and starvation are terrible experiences that make a man do terrible things that he never imagined to do in all his life. John Kelly draws that very picture in his book The Graves Are Walking with magnificence. John Kelly’s research shows that the death toll was staggering during the potato famine of 1845 where more than one million Irish people died due to starvation and disease and those who tried to run faced death on their journey to a so-called New World. The scholar Terry Eagleton calls it an event “with something of the characteristics of a low-level nuclear attack” which was clearly the worst disaster of the 19^th century. The author conveys all the feelings of the horror of that world to the readers in a very dramatic and convincing way.