Take a look at the menu above and, if you have been here before, you will notice something missing. A Purgatory of Misery has gone. That is because it is now a print and digital book. The digital version is available to pre-order right now. Print and digital will be released on 20th November. Click the link above to go to Amazon.

Here are a few of the things you will discover by reading the book:

• How a request for help from an Irish King led to 800 years of enmity and distrust between Ireland and her larger neighbour
• How subsequent contests for land and power on the British mainland spilled over into Ireland with terrible consequences for that nation’s inhabitants
• How religious fanaticism, following the Reformation, resulted in the massacre of Irish people and the banning of religious observance
• How Irish Catholics were forbidden to practice certain professions or serve in the British army
• How Irish men enlisted instead for the armies of Britain’s enemies
• Why William of Orange’s success at the Battle of the Boyne was not the victory for Protestantism that some would have you believe
• How the peculiar geography of Ireland made it especially suitable for the cultivation of the humble spud
• How patterns of land ownership and control left Irish people particularly vulnerable to economic crises
• How attitudes to poverty, and the chosen means of alleviating it, proved utterly inadequate to deal with a crisis of monumental proportions
• How British arrogance and self belief contributed to the idea that Irish peasants were inferior
• How annual food shortages, caused by the exhaustion of one year’s crop before the next year’s harvest, may have caused an observed lack of intelligence among the peasant class
• How politicians’ ideologies prevented them from introducing the most appropriate measures to deal with the crisis
• How journalists and independent ‘investigators’ witnessed the horrors and reported them but were unable to offer solutions
• How the citizens of British, American and Canadian cities responded to a nineteenth century refugee crisis
• How Irish orphan girls were transported to Australia to serve the needs of pioneering bachelor farmers
• How an attempted revolution, emulating those taking place elsewhere in Europe, descended into farce
• The origin of the Irish tricoleur

All of that, and more, in a book being sold at the lowest price permitted on Amazon (0.99 in most currencies for the digital version although the price you see may be different because of local sales taxes).