March doesn’t just mean St. Patrick’s Day; the whole month is also dedicated to celebrating Irish-American heritage and their contributions to the US. Here at 3RP, we’re celebrating the contributions Eamon Loingsigh has made to our press and to our readers. His historical fiction tells brutal sagas of Irish-American gangs on the Brooklyn waterfront in the early 20th century and the Irish immigrant dockworker experience, drawing from extensive research and his own family history. Brooklyn Rail called his novels “required reading,” while Irish Central said, “On the surface, Loingsigh’s book mines Brooklyn’s gory and glorious Irish past.  But it is also the quintessential read for 21st century Brooklyn.” Read more about two of his novels below!

LIGHT OF THE DIDDICOY is the brutal saga of Irish-American gangs on the Brooklyn waterfront in the early part of the twentieth century, told through the eyes of Irish immigrant Liam Garrity. Forced at age 14 to travel alone to America on the eve of the 1916 Easter Rising, Garrity stumbles directly into the hard-knock streets of the Brooklyn pier neighborhoods run by Bridge District gang The White Hand. In the industrialized enclaves where Famine Irish settled a generation earlier, Garrity has no choice but to use any means necessary to survive within the clan-like loyalties of the gang, and carve out his place in a no-holds-barred world of a community living outside the law.

“The dark and compelling Irish American gang lifestyle of early 1900s Brooklyn pulses through this sharp, hardboiled drama. Loingsigh’s book looks at a fascinating lifestyle drawn from his extensive research and his own family history.” —Diane Gardner, Foreword Reviews

In 1916, teenage Irish immigrant Liam Garrity struggles to survive on his own in Brooklyn, while his family back in Ireland faces reprisals during the violence of the Easter Rising. With taut writing by a master of historical fiction, EXILE ON BRIDGE STREET relates Liam’s compelling personal story against a background of NYC’s brawling streets, Brooklyn Irish waterfront gangs, an influenza epidemic, the rest of Italian organized crime, and the start of American involvement in World War I. EXILE is part two of the Auld Irishtown trilogy, yet it can be read as a standalone book as well.

“A century following the first and until now last great novel of the Brooklyn waterfront, Ernest Poole’s The Harbor, Eamon Loingsigh offers this gripping tale, soaked in the Irish immigrant dockworker experience and laden with real life legends from a vanished world.” ——James T. Fisher, author of On the Irish Waterfront