Praise for Resting Places

This is a work of eloquent, haunting beauty, a song of mourning and revelation that deserves the widest possible audience. This is a story rooted in a place and time, but it is truly the story of all wars in all times.

Fergal Keane

A powerful, moving book about the heaviness of history and a reckoning with what reconciliation can mean in the present. To read it is to walk with ghosts, to time-travel, to sit with the grandchild of the Irish Civil War as she navigates intergenerational trauma. A story told with deep love, empathy and a desire for healing. I am not the same after reading it.

Claire Mitchell, author of The Ghost Limb: Alternative Protestants and the Spirit of 1798.

Maya Angelou said, ‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you’. Ellen McWilliams unlocks the layers of her intergenerational, untold story of revolution and silences embedded deep in West Cork in this book. A brave, eloquent, and personal account by a literary scholar who has already contributed to the recovery of other Irish women writers’ untold narratives of kinship, exile, secrets and displacement.

Linda Connolly, author of Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence.

In Resting Places Ellen McWilliams has created a new literary form, a series of meditations on personal, ancestral, local and national histories. Each chapter, in an artful meandering, moves as thought moves, from childbirth and pregnancy to Oliver Cromwell’s infancy, or from her husband’s sourdough bread to the death of his great uncle at Ypres. And all the book’s rich materiality – toys, horses, chickens, the Infant of Prague, a list of Irish vocabulary words for the Leaving Cert – leads back in every chapter to reminders of a massacre during the Irish Civil War in McWilliams’s native West Cork. In its efforts to record and comprehend family love, neighbourly kindness, and political violence, Resting Places never simplifies the subjects of its meditation: its perspective is generous, expansive, visionary.

Lucy McDiarmid, author of At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916.

An evocative, highly original, vivid and personal book. Compelling and fascinating throughout.

Richard English, Director of the Senator George Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and author of Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland and Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA.

Land, family, community and tragic history make one of the most powerful and poignant combinations of which human experience is capable, and rarely has it found such an expressive and humane voice, capable of such wonderful language, as that of Ellen McWilliams.

Ronald Hutton, author of The Making of Oliver Cromwell and The British Republic 1649–1660.

‘Rural Ireland does its best to be good at death.’ That refers to obsequies. It might equally signify the creation of death. At the centre of McWilliams’s threnody is a massacre that took place a century ago in West Cork but might as well have been yesterday. It is unforgotten and will continue to be so as her son learns about that ‘exquisitely painful’ time and finds the solace she found in taut prose which is a balm even though it treats of colonial crimes, republican crimes, the contagion of faith, the weight of history and fractured families.

Jonathan Meades

Written more in sorrow than in anger, Ellen McWilliams’s meditations on history, memory and the legacies of atrocity add up to a remarkable conversation between the past and the present, and between silence and articulation. Her explorations begin in, and return to, both her home ground of County Cork, of her family, and of her own physical existence, but they range boldly into the difficult terrain of trauma and grief and bring back the fruits of wisdom and forgiveness.

Fintan O'Toole

Resting Places opens with the vibrant West Cork floral palette of fuchsia, montbretia, foxglove and rhododendron, blooms gesturing to the blood spilled on bruised land in which they grow. Nature, human and other are here interwoven with history and its telling, as Resting Places speaks what has been unspeakable. This unflinching tale is transformative, bearing complex witness to the complications of local and national history, perfectly pitched between outrage and forgiveness. McWilliams’s compelling, courageous, and artful storytelling amplifies what Lindsey Earner-Byrne has called the ‘whispers at the edge of the archive’ and steeply reforms the national story into one of healing and account.

Moynagh Sullivan, founding member of the Irish Motherhood Project.

Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution by Ellen McWilliams is a beautifully fearless conversation about a hidden, unmentionable past that gently removes the obstruction which, for a century, caused us to stammer and speak in hushed tones.

Stephen Travers, peace activist and survivor of the Miami Showband Massacre, Newry, County Down, 1975.

Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution is passionate and often disturbing but it is also enriching and therapeutic. Ellen McWilliams is sensitively responsive to the natural world of her own childhood and that of her growing son yet she is painfully aware of the dark secrets it conceals and the fragility of its promises. Resting places are never as completely paradisal as they seem to the passing gaze. Long before they reach the end, readers of this book will have developed an acuter understanding of the apparent simplicities of the ‘murderous fields’ of the Irish countryside.

Timothy Webb, editor of The Penguin Selected Poetry of W.B. Yeats.

A rich and complex book, partly a hymn in praise of the writer’s family and the locale in West Cork from which they and she sprang, partly a memoir of the writer’s own life, and partly a meditation on violence and hurt in West Cork during the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. E.M. Forster described the Alexandrian Greek poet C.P. Cavafy as, ‘standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe’. Ellen McWilliams is a writer in the same mould. ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ (as Emily Dickinson counselled) are her watchwords. What she writes about has been written about before, but the way she does it here has never been done before. This book is all freshly minted – striking, surprising, and remarkable.

Carlo Gébler