Olive Collins Books In Order

Publication Order of The O'Neill Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Olive Collins
Olive Collins grew up in Tipperary, Ireland. She has traveled extensively and lived abroad for years. She is a bestselling and award winning historical fiction author.

“The Memory of Music” won the Annie McHale Best Debut and it remained in the Bestselling Charts for 3 months.

Olive’s inspiration is the ordinary everyday people that feed her little snippets of their lives. It is the unsaid and the gaps in conversation which she finds the most valuable. She’s also always loved the diversity of people and books.

“The Memory of Music” is the first novel in the “O’Neill” series and was released in 2016. A single Irish family during 100 turbulent years.

1916. Betty O’Fogarty is clever and proud. Spurred on by her belief in her husband’s talent making violins and her desire to escape from rural life, they elope to Dublin. She expects life here to fulfill all of her dreams. But to her horror, she learns that they can just afford to live in the notorious poverty ridden tenements.

Seamus gets obsessed with Republican politics and winds up neglecting his lucrative craft. While Dublin gets plunged into chaos as The Easter Rebellion of 1916, Betty gives birth to their first child to the sound of shelling and gunfire. However Betty vows that she’ll survive want and war, and move her small family out of the tenements. Nothing is going to stand in her way.

A hundred years later, secrets start churning their way up to the surface and Betty’s grandkids and great-grandkids uncover both Betty’s ruthlessness and her special brand of heroism.

“The Tide Between Us” is the second novel in the “O’Neill” series and was released in 2017. 1821. Among the thousands of Irish deportees to the Caribbean British Colonies is Art O’Neill, a ten year old Irish boy. Art is an Indentured Servant on this sugar plantation in Jamaica, and gradually acclimatizes to the exotic country and to the unfamiliar customs of the African slaves. Once the new heirs to the plantation arrive from Ireland they resurrect the ghosts of some brutal injustices against Art.

He just bides his time and hides his abhorrence from his new master by channeling his energy into his work. During these years he prospers, he sees his colored kids freed after emancipation, and acquires land while taking the reader on a multi-generational historical saga.

Eventually Art gets promised seven gold coins, one for each decade of service. He doubts that his master is going to part with these coins. The morning that Art sets out to claim his gratuity, he ignores the sense of foreboding that he might not return back home alive.

1991, Ireland. A hundred years later this skeleton is found underneath a fallen tree on the grounds of Lugdale Estate. By its side is this gold coin minted back in 1870. Yseult, who owns the estate, watches the events unfold, fearful of the long buried truths which might emerge about her family’s past and its connections to the slave trade. While the skeleton gives up more of its secrets, Yseult realizes that she can no longer hide.

Inspired by the true story of 2,000 Irish kids deported to Jamaica and the statistics that 25% or Jamaican citizens claim Irish ancestry. This is a powerful novel that documents true historical events and the human spirit’s resilience.

“The Weaver’s Legacy” is the third novel in the “O’Neill” series and was released in 2020. 1866. Goldie O’Neill was just nine years old when she journeyed across the unclaimed American West with her family in order to form their own Irish Catholic Colony. Their new community had these dreams about prosperity and self-governance that was far removed from the anti-Irish prejudice and sentiment of the ruling classes. They quickly learned about the extremes of the American West and the ongoing Indian war.

One year after they arrived, Goldie blames herself for her sister going missing. She forms this unlikely friendship with this Lakota Indian boy that promises to help with her lifelong quest to locate her sister. In the intervening years, while their community flourishes and there is a new prejudice that surfaces, her sister’s disappearance ebbs away for everybody except for Goldie.

1937. Lucy O’Neill was adopted by Goldie O’Neill, her aunt. Once she learns that Lorcan O’Neill, her dad, has come back to the small town in the Midwest after his thirty year absence, and she returns to meet with him. Aware of the silence which surrounds his name and the reluctance of her family to actually reveal the full story, Lucy delves deeper into the past so she can find a story that is far removed from the account that her aunt had told her.

“Manhattan Ember” is the fourth novel in the “O’Neill” series and was released in 2023. In 1866, onboard this immigrant ship bound for New York, events play out that have this everlasting effect on their lives, and the lives of their offspring.

Marguerite Kelley, who is the daughter of this esteemed Irish immigrant, grew up in this home which was dominated by her uncle’s disappearance. On this windy morning in November of 1905, she’s the first to hear about this skeleton tucked under the eaves of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Manhattan. Suspecting that these remains are that of her uncle that worked on the construction of the Cathedral, she wants to be the first person to break the news to Roisin, his widow, and to her Irish born dad. She hopes that this discovery is going to solve a mystery which has overshadowed her family for a quarter century now.

Roisin Gallagher had a lot of nicknames and names during her 5 decades. While a child, she joined the thousands that departed Ireland’s shore looking for a better life. In New York, she was known as The Orphan Gallagher. She got married twice and took both her husband’s names and once her second husband vanished, she was known as the Widow Kilbane. Ger Kilbane was like a myth, a man that fell off the face of the earth.

Patrick is told by his daughter about the discovery of the skeleton in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which he helped build, he realizes that it’s just as impossible to flee from his family’s past as it is for a man to vanish.