This is the first Swahili translation of the classic novel Under the Hawthorn Tree, first published in English in 1990 by the O’Brien Press in Ireland. It has been translated into eight languages and filmed for TV. The first in the Children of the Famine Trilogy, it is set in 1845, during the devastation of the Irish potato famine, brilliantly illustrated through the story of three young sibling survivors. They are cast adrift, as their baby sister dies and is buried under the hawthorn tree – linked with the otherworld in Irish mythology; their father goes to seek work but does not return; their mother goes in search of him, and so the children are alone to fend for themselves. The novel tells of their courageous and arduous journey of hundreds of miles to find their great-aunts heard about in their mother’s stories.