Jean Grainger

The World Starts Anew Jean Grainger

Ballycreggan, Northern Ireland, 1955Erich Bannon is happy in the small Irish village he has thought of as home since he arrived as a terrified, traumatised seven year old, one of the last Jewish children to escape Berlin in 1939. Now twenty three years old, it feels like all of his friends are drawn to The Promised Land, and he can understand why, but Israel is not for him. One by one, they leave, and Erich is bereft. Feeling lonely, he wonders if he should just go too, but a chance encounter with an Irish Catholic girl makes him feel hope again. All he and Róisín want is to be allowed to love each other but the traditions and rules of their backgrounds forbid it. When Róisín is spirited away by her family, Erich wonders if their relationship was doomed from the start, and he's drawn to the bright lights of New York to salve his broken heart. By the time he learns that Róisín wasn't honest with him about her family and what kind of people they really were, it is too late and he finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a dangerous world from which there seems to be no escape, no matter where he goes. From rural Ireland, to the glitz of 1950's America, from the orange groves of Israel to the dark streets of post-war Liverpool, The World Starts Anew, is the fourth book in the best-selling Star and the Shamrock series.