Black Irish White Jamaican

About the Book

After many years of watching people’s disbelief when recounting her personal adventures, tragedies, and survival about life in Jamaica, the author was inspired to write them down and mold them into a book for readers to enjoy. The story begins in 1951 when Tom O’Brien, the author’s father, leaves his native Ireland with his pregnant wife Maeve and two year old son Peter to start a new life in their adopted home of Jamaica. The book recounts their interesting stories and miraculous survival during Jamaica’s violent, dangerous years of the seventies and eighties. The author’s personal stories of her Jamaican upbringing in a completely dysfunctional yet loving family are strewn with amusing highs and unnerving lows, but it is her mother’s journey of bravery and growth that is mostly highlighted in the book. Maeve’s painful personal challenges are hard enough to endure, but it is in later years, when she and the family are surrounded by corrupt politics, barbaric crimes and hateful racial turmoil, that her survival story becomes only more incredulous. Amazingly, in spite of these challenges, she only grows stronger and wiser as the years go by. The unbearable politics and crime forces the family to flee Jamaica in the late seventies. The book details the immigration journey that eventually leads to safety in the United States of America. Maeve always remained proud of the brave choices she made in her life, difficult choices, but ones that ultimately empowered her to find independence and peace. She was a true survivor.

About the Author

Niamh O’Brien was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1951 to Irish parents who had emigrated there from Dublin. She lived in Jamaica for most of her childhood and early adulthood until she immigrated to the United States in 1977. In 1998, she graduated magna cum laude from University of Houston. Married with three sons and four grandchildren, she currently resides in Houston, Texas, with her husband. Black Irish White Jamaican is Niamh’s first book.