Niche history reads

Niamh Kelleher

@nighttramniamh

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The books I actually finish, wedged between UX interviews and catching the last Luas. No sweeping empires here, just the odd corners of history that make you go 'wait, WHAT?' at a pub table. Half of these I found by accident in secondhand shops around town, which feels right for the subject matter.

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Niche history reads — 10 items
Name	Title	Author	Why I keep it
1Dublin: The Making of a Capital City	Dublin: The Making of a Capital City	David Dickson	Explains why my own street looks the way it does. Dense, but so is a good stew.
2The Year of the French	The Year of the French	Thomas Flanagan	Fiction, technically, but it taught me more about 1798 than school ever did. Sneaky like that.
3A Short History of Ireland	A Short History of Ireland	Richard Killeen	The one I lend to visiting cousins so they stop asking me to explain the Famine over brunch.
4Wherever Green Is Worn	Wherever Green Is Worn	Tim Pat Coogan	Explains half my extended family's American cousins. Doorstopper, but worth the wrist ache.
5The Cadaver Game	The Cadaver Game	James Vincent Murphy	Obscure enough that nobody at book club had heard of it. I felt very smug for a week.
6Vanishing Ireland	Vanishing Ireland	James Fennell and Turtle Bunbury	Portraits of old-timers with stories that make my UX interview transcripts look boring by comparison.
7Ireland: A History	Ireland: A History	Robert Kee	The one that actually made 800 years of grievance make sense in one sitting. Mostly.
8The Ghost Light	The Ghost Light	Joseph O'Connor	About the Abbey Theatre's Molly Allgood, and it made me walk past the Abbey differently ever since.
9Rebellion: A History of Ireland from 1798	Rebellion: A History of Ireland from 1798	Peter de Rosa	Long enough to survive several Luas delays. Genuinely handy for that.
10Dublin 4	Dublin 4	Maeve Binchy	Not strictly history but it's a time capsule of a Dublin that's basically gone now, so it counts.

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