One thing I love about historical fiction is that uncertainty of whether this is real or not, yes the setting and events are real but are the characters involved in the story based on real people? I have to admit that I spent quite a bit of time browsing the internet to try and find any reference to them, the location and side events seem to be deliberately written to try and throw me off the scent…at one point I thought I had the upper hand when looking for a doctor but alas I came up empty handed.

Rose, Rudy, Ultan and Chink…oh and Freddy….are a great bunch of characters, Cunningham writes with such tenderness that you can’t help falling for them. Rose is blind and at the beginning of the book you find out she wasn’t born like this, an event has happened in her past to leave her this way, you can just sense that this event is rife with violence. Watching the love develop between Rose and Rudy was some real clever writing and I especially enjoyed the scenes on the beach with Rose and Chink, some real on the edge of the seat stuff. But always in the background is that element of danger and it doesn’t matter whether you want a character to survive or not you are left at the mercy of Cunningham. The epilogue was a real class ending, raising all my internet search questions again…very crafty indeed.

This was a tough subject to read about, I didn’t know much about the events surrounding the Irish independence, living in England my history lessons didn’t go into too much detail about how brutal we were and what the Black and Tans did to the people. This lack of knowledge by me made Cunningham’s writing truly heart-breaking, because these characters might be fictional but these events happened again and again to many real people.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, it was an intriguing read that left me wondering just how I would act in these situations.

Blog Review is here: felcherman.wordpress.com/2020/11/04/blog-tour-freedom-is-a-land-i-cannot-see-by-peter-cunningham/