The Defiant Heart

An earlier version of this book was published as The Abiding Heart. The book tells the story of Diarmaid MacGuinness, who has been committed to the battle for Irish independence from the English since he was a boy, an Irish patriot's son. Now a man, his job is to travel as unobtrusively as possible around the west of Ireland gathering groups of like-minded men to form and train into rebel cells, who will stand in waiting for the day when there are enough to challenge the British supremacy. Diarmaid thinks he's seen poverty among the Irish before, but he discovers a new level of bare existence in the rocky mountains and bogs of Donegal. The pitiful settlements known as clachans are new to him. The endless job of scraping a living from the nearly infertile land in the west in Donegal eats up a person's endurance. The basic business of growing the bare minimum of food necessary to sustain life and maintaining some form of shelter is exhausting for many of the men and women responsible for their families. The effort of rebellion seems too much. But among them are some in whom the hope of freedom glows brightly. One of those is Muirne Coyle, whose tangled red hair is no more vivid than her defiant belief that life can be different, and that Diarmaid MacGuinness is there to show them how. She will do whatever is required to build a free Ireland, governed by the Irish. She will throw herself into the struggle, even if it means leaving everything familiar to her and walking across Ireland with a man she barely knows. When Diarmaid determines he has to return to counsel with the men who had sent him, Muirne has been injured and he feels unable to leave her to cope alone. Instead he takes her along, against his better judgment. On their long walk through Ireland, they form bonds that only grow from shared hardship, shared decisions, and shared hope. At the end of the journey, their situation is complicated beyond their worst expectations. It is then that they must decide what they are willing to sacrifice and what they must keep for a still undefined future of struggle.