The Family on Paradise Pier

Publisher’s synopsis

Starting in the tranquil idyll of a Donegal village in 1915, The Family on Paradise Pier follows the extraordinary journeys of one Irish family through the War of Independence, the General Strike in Britain, Moscow’s dangerous streets in the 1930’s, the Spanish Civil War and on to Soviet gulags, Irish Internment camps and London during the Blitz. The Goold Verschoyle children are born into a respected freethinking Protestant family in a Manor House alive with laughter, debate and fascinating guests. But the world of picnics and childish infatuations is soon under threat as political changes within Ireland and the wider world encroach upon their private paradise.

The Family on Paradise Pier shows how quickly a family and a class can find themselves displaced and considered foreigners within their own land, with a new generation forced to invent new roles in which to belong. For Eva the dream is to be an artist, yet her fragile vision cannot cope with first love or the reality of London art school. She finds herself married into a stiff Anglo-Irish family, struggling with growing debts and with trying to keep open her soul to the new perceptions while yearning for personal freedom.

Politics is how Eva’s brothers make sense of their new world. The eldest son, Art, rejects his inheritance to become a hard-line Marxist. Isolating himself from his family, he tries to belong among the poor, a party agitator working as a manual labourer in Dublin, Moscow and London. Brendan, the carefree and less fanatical younger brother, also embraces communism until confronted by its harsh realities in the Spanish Civil War with consequences that will haunt and divide his family.

Based on the true life story of his friend, Sheila Fitzgerald (née Goold-Verschoyle 1903-2000) whom he first met when he was eighteen and she was seventy-three and who is called Eva in the novel, this family saga grows into an extraordinarily kaleidoscopic portrait of the lives, dreams and tensions of a generation finding their own paths in life between the World Wars. Bolger superbly recreates a family in flux, driven by idealism, racked by argument and united by love and the vivid memories of childhood. 

Thirteen years after this volume first appeared, Bolger would go on to tell the story of the second half of Eva’s extraordinary life is a standalone sequel novel, An Ark of Light.

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